Introduction

It was not long ago, when Intel was the only word on everyone's lips that were in the market for purchasing a PC. Intel made certain of that with millions of dollars spend on advertising, and creating the now famous phrase 'Intel Inside'. This enabled new users who were somewhat dismayed by the plethora of technical terms making purchasing a PC a complete nightmare. That was then, but now Intel have a major competitor in the form of AMD, who have been producing reliable, quality and blisteringly fast processors, with a price tag that will not burn a hole in your pocket. Well this review could end here, but as history has it, this is not always the case, and we are certain this information is not privileged to us only. Intel does not need to be reminded of history, as the Intel Pentium 4 is living proof of that. There are certain Intel users out there that will not purchase anything other than Intel, and as such Intel has to reward these customers with their loyalty, as well as recapture users that have jumped the fence and vanished to the other side. AMD once an underdog with a reputation of producing processor with sub-par performance and an inability to deliver on time, has become a major threat to Intel in the past 14 months, and it is AMD that is leading the market into the 21st century with the Athlon and Duron range of processors forging ahead with a reputation of having the fastest processor and manufacturing capability to meet the ever increasing demands put on it by users.

Intel's flagship until now has been the Pentium III, which is currently restricted to 1GHz until the middle of 2001. This has allowed Intel to unleash its new micro-architecture, which Intel refers to as NetBurst Micro-architecture, and the first IA-32 processor in the shape of the Pentium 4. There are two members of this family currently 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz, however there is rumoured to be a 1.3GHz shortly.

How we carried out our test

We were provided with a criteria of testing the Engineering Sample shipped to us by Intel, However, due to the restriction of time, we were unable to carry out all the test recommended by Intel, and were restricted to our normal 3DMARK 2000, Content Creation Winstone 2000, BAPCo's SYSmark 2000 and BAPCo's WebMark 2001. The test carried out does provide an excellent benchmark for the Intel Pentium 4 and the Intel D850GB desktop Motherboard.

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