Paul et al: This is interesting:
Maximum PCs April issue reviews the latest HP Pavilion 950. The first OEM system they've reviewed with the GeForce4, it also came with a 2.2GHz P4, and 1GB of PC2100 DDR.
It got a record SYSmark2001 score for them, 202, faster than any other machine they've tested. However, when commenting on the configuration they say "For now anyway, the HP can't be beat -- except by other Pentium 4 machines using RDRAM."!!!
They continue "In our own tests, 2.2GHZ Northwood RDRAM configurations have turned in scores about 5 percent faster than similar configs using Intel's own DDR chipset. We believe the choice of DDR over RDRAM put a crimp on the Pavilion's scores, which, while great, could have been stellar. But that's a choice you'll have to make: a bit more performance or less-expensive memory." OK, so they're not quite up on the cost parity issue yet.
Their final comment "If we had a do-over, we'd probably spec the Pavilion with RDRAM instead of DDR." JFD |
