roduct: Pentium 4 3,06 GHz
Manufacturer: Intel
Author: Hilbert Hagedoorn
Date: December, 2002

It was not really long ago, well weeks actually that we have tested the Pentium 4 2,8 GHz. While writing that review I of course already made note of the fact that the 3 GHz was on the way. Here we are, two weeks after the official announcement I receive a nice box with one mainboard, the seriously most dangerous active fan I have ever seen and of course a Pentium 3,06 GHz processor. The minute I unpacked I already knew that it had to be send back to Intel in two weeks .. wiping little tear from eye. Seriously, amazing .. I described the 2,8 GHz as a Ferrari well, we have a new one. My God, how fast this technology is evolving. This CPU is way ahead of everything your PC needs. We did a lot of tests and well .. even the Radeon 9700 Pro we used was simply a bottleneck in higher resolutions, not the processor.

This is the review of the Intel Pentium 3.06 GHz processor, and to date nothing can beat it. The press package came with PC1066 RDRAM, an awesome combination but also a very expensive one. We did it a bit different though, as I knew this processor would be submitted to us I asked the guys from Albatron to send in their best Pentium  mainboard and they did. Combined with DDR400 memory we manage to produce breathtaking numbers for a very reasonable price with 100% stability.

There is something new in this CPU, you all know it, heard it and read about it so I will not waste too much time on it but of course this is Hyper-Threading technology.

Hyper-Threading  is a very innovative technology that basically makes a single 'normal' processor appear as two "logical" processors. It does this by adding a certain two-way aproach in the core, therefore splitting the CPU's resources managed by the operating system. According to Intel, this results in a performance increase in applications that are designed and implemented to take advantage of multi-threading, as well as applications using otherwise-idle CPU resources. Although a motherboard, BIOS, CPU and a capable operating system such as Windows XP is required to utilize Hyper-Threading, the 3.06GHz Pentium 4 is the first processor from Intel to support it, it will still operate in a non-HT system problem free, you just don't have Hyper Threading enabled then.