Pentium 4 Systems: To Buy or Not To Buy / To Cry Or Not to Cry

Feature Comparison

Now that you had a good look at the configuration of the four competitors it's time to compare the features of the low-end and the high-end systems side by side.

Dell's 'little' 'Limited Edition' Pentium 4 is not equipped that much worse than Gateway's Athlon system. There are a few remarkable things however.

First of all, Dell is realizing the 'low price' by equipping the Pentium 4 1.3 GHz with PC600 RDRAM. This memory type is no less than 25% slower than PC800 RDRAM, having a very bad impact on the memory bandwidth-sensitive Pentium 4. A Pentium 4 1.5 GHz with PC600 RDRAM is 5-8% slower than with PC800 RDRAM. If you should ever decide to go for a Pentium 4 system, please take my advice and invest in PC800.

The other and most important difference between the Dell and the Gateway system is clearly the 3D-card, which I marked in red. NVIDIA's GeForce2 Pro is of course way faster than the GeForce2 MX. This graphics card alone will assure that the Gateway system will kill Dell's Pentium 4 box in any 3D-benchmark. The good 3D-performance of Pentium 4 has simply been cancelled out.

Last but not least the Gateway system comes with a home networking card and a bit more software for the same price. The other components seem pretty much on par.