Thoughts
Intel's Pentium 4 570J LGA775 CPU rollout has been a muted affair. It represents the company's fastest desktop CPU, in terms of clock speed, for the forseeable future. Intel has decided that the way forward is to adopt a higher work-per-clock-cycle approach that AMD's been exploiting successfully. Whether that ultimately lies with dual-core CPUs or faster variants of the excellent Dothan remains to be seen.The 570J does well just where you would expect, that is, in media encoding and applications that have been optimised for its SSE3 architecture. However, where it and other Prescotts are found wanting is in gaming performance. Just take a second look at the graphs and you'll see that an AMD Athlon 64 3500+, costing around £190, is faster in every benchmark. That's more of a testament to the Prescott's games-orientated failings than anything else. Even a well-tuned 3.4GHz S478 Northwood setup is able to keep decent pace with this 3.8GHz model at times.
A predicted asking price of £450 significantly takes away from the processor's attractiveness. The marginally slower 3.6GHz 560 is now a full £170 less; that's a lot to pay for just over 5% extra clock speed. The 570J, then, doesn't make a whole lot of sense, in upgrading terms, unless you're a die-hard Intel supporter with up to £500 to drop on a processor right now. To be fair, Intel's probably aiming it towards the larger system integrators who simply add it to their current catalogues as an optional extra. I'm thinking along the lines of Dell's XPS desktop range here.
In summary, it's very hard to recommend the Pentium 4 570J when the competition, AMD, is currently doing so well. I'd either opt for a cheaper 5xx model and overclock it, hopefully, to the 570J's default 3.8GHz clock speed, or go for any number of Athlon 64 CPUs. Dual-core Smithfield can't come soon enough, I say. Up until then, though, Intel's top-end desktop processors' performance won't be giving Dr. Hector Ruiz sleepless nights.
