Review: Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz

As with any new Pentium 4 processor, the price for entry into the exclusive new CPU ownership club will be very high. Over £500 will be the price range for a while on this new CPU in the UK. The knock on effect is that processors like the 2.8 and 2.66 will get much more affordable with the 2.66 sitting under the £250 mark hopefully. Remember all 3 are new C1 stepping processors and have a very decent overclocking headroom.

Performance from CPU scaling alone is enough to make it the fastest x86 consumer processor that money can buy. Add HyperThreading to the mix and depending on the applications you are running you either add another bit of performance on top, or you take a little away. Generally it's a performance win (on the Hexus test suite anyway) despite that performance win being relatively small.

Compiler optimisation I'd expect to help things further and I suspect a fair few applications could be tuned for a decent HyperThreading performance increase over what they'd get already. As always as with technologies like SSE, SSE2 and 3DNow, it's not always obvious what applications will benefit until applications are specifically tuned. To this end I suspect HyperThreading will have more of an effect in the future but at the moment it's only a marginal boost.

The overclocking performance and CPU scaling at 3GHz are what impress me most with this new processor. You don't have to run with HyperThreading enabled (and of course you may not even wish to run the processor on a board that even supports it) and as a single processor with HyperThreading off, it simply flies.

Points to Intel for HyperThreading and for ushering in 3GHz+ from a consumer processor. I suspect enthusiasts will jump on this processor immediately and I can't see the freon brigade resisting for very long, 4000MHz is a very nice number after all.

Pro's

HyperThreading (although it's benefits aren't overwhelming)
3066MHz
Overclocking performance
Pushes the price of lesser models lower

Con's

Very expensive

Overall

9/10

Thanks

Intel as always for the sample
Sapphire for the R9700 Pro
#2CPU on Freenode for help with my scheduling questions