To: milo_morai who wrote (74006 ) 3/8/2002 12:42:25 AM From: Petz Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 275872 Two of Acdhardware's conclusions don't make much sense: First, When the Athlon XP was released, the Pentium 4 Willamette cut a rather foolish figure and was beaten in almost every benchmark. This humiliation wouldn't have taken place if the Willamette had access to a PC1066 DRDRAM platform. Huh, first of all, except for the last two benchmarks in the article, both the P4 Willamette and the P4 Northwood are still beaten silly by the XP2000+ using ordinary PC2100, even when the P4's use PC1066! Second, its only now that higher speed RDRAM is starting to become available. I hardly can bank on a few samples of overclocked PC800 that happen to work at Aceshardware to claim that RDRAM PC1066 is a viable technology. Would DELL put PC800 on a motherboard and overclock it 33%? True PC1066 is extremely expensive even now and was almost non-existent when Willamette was so "embarrassing." Third, the author tries to push the idea of buying a Willamette 2 GHz and connecting it to overclocked RDRAM or PC2700 DDR, instead of buying a Northwood 2 GHz P4. The only problem is, this requires an unlocked CPU , something ordinary mortals don't have access to. He reduced the multiplier and increased the bus speed to keep it at ~2 GHz. This reminds me of someone buying a TBird 1400 rather than an XP1600+ because the TBird has an unlocked multiplier. Dumb idea. I did like the choice of benchmarks and a lot can be learned from seeing how different combinations of memory bandwidth and latency affect performance. Did you catch the note that Windows Media Encoder 8.0, which must only work with Windows XP, apparently enables SSE (finally!) on the Athlon XP processors? Petz