Conclusion
The Pentium 4's clock speed is gaining considerable momentum since the transition to a 0.13u manufacturing process. The release of the 2.66GHz and possibly 2.8GHz parts are imminent. News of a 3.06GHz CPU making its debut at the end of the year has been filtering into the on-line community. The latter is by no means official, however.
I ordered two 2.26 GHz P4 CPUs at the end of June after hearing good things with respect to their overclocking ability. This particular 2.26GHz P4 is stable at 3GHz with around 1.6v load, the other manages around 2.85GHz at the same voltage. They both can comfortably operate at 2.66GHz with default voltage, however.
The numbers posted by the overclocked 2.26GHz @ 3GHz processor show that meaningful gains are to be had in every application, whether it be office-based or gaming-related. Applications such as WAV - MP3 encoding and DVD - DivX encoding enjoy an almost linear increase in performance, whilst even relatively card-limited gaming enjoys a substantial boost.
What is evident, however, is that Intel do have the capacity to release faster grades of the P4 processor in the coming months. Although I've been a little unfair in including an XP2100 and not Thoroughbred XP2200 processor as comparison, I do feel that AMD need to migrate on to a 166FSB to remain competitive. All the key ingredients are already in place. There is now widespread availability of PC2700 memory modules, even PC3200 modules are beginning to infiltrate the market. All that is required is a divider change in AMD-based motherboards, something that chipset makers will find relatively easy to adopt.
I've found it somewhat eye-opening to see just how well the present Northwood P4 will scale. Those that lamented the release of the P4, one with a low work-per-cycle ethos, may now want to review their assumptions. Sure, the Pentium4 requires an additional 30 - 40% more clock-speed to match the Athlon XP's benchmarks, but when you can scale as well as it does, clock-speed becomes rather academic, we solely focus on the benchmarks results.
The high-end P4s are still prohibitively expensive for the majority of us. If, however, you can find a mid-range processor that others have successfully overclocked, you may just land a comparative bargain. It appears that certain pack-dates are better suited to overclocking than others. The question is knowing which. Decent overclocking forums usually carry information on users' results, so that would be a good place to start. Happy hunting.
