Intel Pentium 4 2,80 GHz
moving into 6th gear

Product: Pentium 4
Manufacturer: Intel
Author: Hilbert Hagedoorn
Date: September, 2002

For a while now I've been trying to contact the two big CPU gods to ask them if it would be to be possible to test and review their new CPU's. It's simple, we are a site dedicated to the hardcore gamer that craves the need for the best and the fastest gaming rigs. Next to your graphics card the processor is such an important aspect within that process, we know for a fact that you'd like to see and observe performance of the latest CPU's and see what benefits they have for your (future) gaming rig.

As stated we are a hardware site with an audience that primarily are gamers, therefore we will review CPU's in a somewhat different way then other sites tend to do, mostly with game benchmarks. Not because we like them so much, no because I know you want to see that. We could test how fast your spreadsheet's macro function is updated or if that mp3 was encoded 2 seconds faster but I know for a fact you don't care very much about that so why bother. We'll go in-depth the gamers way.

I'm glad to state that we finally have found an 'entrance' into the Intel marketing channel. You have no idea how hard it is to get 'first contact' with the larger companies. While Guru3D.com is a somewhat bigger site with monthly 5 to 6 million pageviews most companies who do not know us still see us as 'just another website'. Therefore I'm very thankful that Intel finally has recognized us and decided to work with us. Within two days after dialog with a Dutch press-agency I received a mainboard, rambus memory and two  processors to for testing purposes. Unfortunately we can only do a small select test as the products we have had to be returned within two weeks. Hopefully in the future Intel will grant us a dedicated test-setup so that we can test graphics cards on both a Pentium and AMD Athlon platform.

[rant] And please,  if anyone from AMD is reading this, yes we'd like to include your latest products also .. but please contact us as your PR/marketing is a daytime nightmare to get contact with. [/rant]

On-with the review now, Intel submitted a processor that you will not find or hardly find in the stores yet, the Pentium 4 2.8 GHz with 533 MHz system bus, it's the latest model of the Pentium 4 and was designed to bring you some brutal horsepower in your PC, let's call this a little Ferrari power under that hood of yours. The processor did not take us by surprise though, AMD recently released their 2600+ Thoroughbred core based Athlon so it was just a matter of time before Intel decided to release a product that can compete with it.

Specifications of the Pentium 4B Processor
533MHz System Bus and a core clock up to 2.8GHz

• Available at 2.26GHz,  2.4GHz, 2.53, 2.66 and 2.80GHz speeds
• 533MHz "Quad Pumped" Front Side Bus
• Based upon Intel’s 0.13 micron manufacturing process
• Now built on 300mm wafers for 2X die out per wafer and lower cost
• 512K on chip, Full Speed L2 Cache
• Rapid Execution Engine - ALU clocked at 2X frequency of core
• 128bit Floating Point/Multimedia unit
• "Hyper Pipelined" Technology for extremely high clock speeds
• Featuring the Intel "NetBurst" micro-architecture
• Supported by the Intel® 850 and i845 chipsets, as well as other chipsets from SiS and VIA 
• Fully compatible with existing Intel Architecture-based software
• Internet Streaming SIMD Extensions 2
• Intel® MMX™ media enhancement technology
• Memory cache ability up to 4 GB of addressable memory space and system memory scalability up to 64 GB of physical memory
• Support for uni-processor designs
• 1.5V operating voltage range

Backside of the Pentium 4 - Click here to enlarge