HardOCP Pentium 4 2.8GHz Review
hardocp.com
"Overall, the Northwood 2.80GHz is a winner, for more reasons that just benchmarks. The performance across the board in all our benchmarks had the 2.80GHz CPU scale accordingly and offering very good performance scoring the highest in almost every benchmark. While there is no “NEW” technology being offered up this time around, hitting the 2.8GHz mark is no small feat, and something many of us have been looking forward on the road to seeing the 3GHz unit by years end.
Speaking of “other reasons” the 2.80GHz is a winner, a new processor release means that the current top-of-the-line CPU’s will get a hefty price cut in the very near future. People looking to get into a decent Pentium 4 rig can now look forward to grabbing a 2.53GHz Northwood for much less money, thanks to the newly released CPU’s.
As I mentioned, the introduction of the 2.80GHz right now almost assures us that we will see a 3.0GHz part for the holiday season, and thereby fulfilling the predictions and prophecies from around the Net of 3GHz by years end. If the CPU we have here is any indication of what kind of CPUs Intel is yielding right now, Intel could surprise us all and hit with an even faster product than 3.0GHz by years end, and wouldn’t that be interesting. I would not count of it though, although we are almost assured at this point that the 3GHz Pentium 4 will come with HyperThreading enabled.
As for the enthusiast and "bang for the buck," the AMD 2400+ has got to stick in your mind even though we have yet to see any. When they show up, we are almost assured they will be sub-$200 CPUs and it is very likely that they have the same, if not better, overclocking ability that we saw in their 2600+. Not to steal any thunder from Intel, but I am waiting to see what the 2400+ will do before I spend my hard-earned cash. Also now that the Intel upgrade path has been muddied by the reporting that 3GHz Intel boards will need new onboard power supplies, it makes us a bit uneasy. If this is true, which Intel will not confirm nor deny, then we will have a hard time recommending anyone buy an Intel based motherboard at this time.
Still, the icing on the cake is the overclocking ability of the 2.80GHz which is phenomenal. A 500MHz overclock is good in any book, especially with simple water cooling and a mild voltage adjustment. With some added juice and a TEC, we could see some great OC numbers coming out of the community. It looks as if Intel has achieved their goal of keeping the performance crown for the time being. With Intel firing on all cylinders and able to hit 3.0GHz and up at will, things could get very interesting…very fast."
Also, an interesting afterthought:
"I love it when our readers know more than we do (which happens a lot). Although this has not been fully confirmed, the contributor is very much on the right track and this is surely information you will want to have if you are buying a Pentium 4 with hopes of overclocking it.
Several notes/comments on your article.
According to your article, there is nothing really new with the new P4 2.8GHz. There are a few other changes, as Aceshardware will report later in the day.
The 2.8 is the first P4 to use the new C1 stepping, as you can see with CPUID. Moreover, look at the L1 cache info under CPUID (and compare it to the older P4 processors), and you'll see that Intel doubled the number of entries in the instruction TLB. If I recall correctly, AMD did something like this with the move from the Thunderbird to the Palomino.
Some have said this change was made to aid in future versions of the 2.8 that may have Hyperthreading enabled, but apparently this may also improve performance for certain other types of operations. Certainly, this seems the case from a few of your benchmarks, where scaling exceeds the 2.8/2.53=10.5% that should be the theoretical maximum, given no changes other than increased clock.
In Serious Sam, you saw a 23+% improvement with the 2.8 over the 2.53; in Commanche 4, you saw a 11.5% improvement; in Jedi Knight II, you saw a 13% improvement. In each case, the improvement exceeded the 10.5% theoretical maximum assuming simply an increased clock. Other sites/reviewers also found a 16% improvement in TMPGEnc, a 25% improvement in SuperPI, and a 29% improvement in PovRay. You might want to make note of this in your review, for anyone buying a P4 will want to make sure they get the new C1 stepping."
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