Intel Pentium 4 1.7 GHz Review

It´s not too long ago that AMD released the Athlon 1333 processor, which was able to take over the crown for the fastest PC-microprocessor in the vast majority of benchmarks. This situation wasn´t as much of a big issue, since the previous holder of that crown had been AMD´s Athlon 1200. Intel´s Pentium 4 1.5 GHz may have a higher clock speed than both AMD processors, but its design wouldn´t let it perform particularly well in today´s applications. To make matters worse for Intel´s flagship processor, it used to come at a clearly higher price than AMD´s Athlon and it is restricted to the expensive as well as unpopular RDRAM memory. To ease this pain, Intel has so far supplied amounts of 128 or 256 MB of this memory type together with Pentium 4 processors or sponsored OEMs with $60 of the RDRAM costs. This situation will change today, as Intel is making another very significant price cut, while reducing the RDRAM-sponsoring to only $30 only for Pentium 4 processors at 1.4 GHz and more. The Pentium 4 1.3 GHz fell out of the RDRAM sponsoring program completely.