Pricing, Overclocking, and the Future

Pricing

If you’re interested in the Pentium 4 570J, Intel is pricing the chip at $637 for 1,000-unit quantities. That’s lower than AMD’s listed price for its Athlon 64 3800+, but higher than the 3800+’s actual street price. The Pentium 4 570J is also significantly less expensive than the Extreme Edition, which lists for $999, but sells online for as much as $1,100.

Overclocking

Despite notable performance setbacks in the face of an elongated execution pipeline, the Prescott core is intended to facilitate greater clock frequencies. Indeed, the architecture’s latest revision offers more headroom and less heat than preceding cores. And while Intel’s own reference motherboards generally don’t showcase the Pentium 4’s flexibility very well, we had better luck this time around with the 570J.

Using the D925XECV2 motherboard and its latest BIOS, which fixes a problem with Intel’s burn-in mode, the 3.8GHz Pentium 4 scaled up to 4.3GHz – the highest setting available – without crashing. It didn’t prove to be as reliable in games, so we dropped it to 4.2GHz, where the platform worked without issue.

CPU-Z reported a 1200MHz front side bus. But because the timings required to get our low-latency DDR2 modules running at that frequency increased, memory performance was inferior to the 925XE’s 1066MHz bus (5,700+ MBps versus 5,400+ MBps). Overall performance did increase, though. At 4.2GHz, Doom 3 scores recorded for 800x600 went from 91.7 frames per second to 100.2 frames per second, a nine percent increase. Scores at 1600x1200 were less impressive – from 68.8 frames to 69.9.

The Future

It’s amazing how quickly plans change. The highly publicized 4GHz launch fell through leading up to the 570J’s 3.8GHz announcement. Then, the 3.73GHz Extreme Edition that was scheduled for a 2004 unveiling met a similar fate. That one wasn’t as widely discussed, but it demonstrates nonetheless that Intel’s roadmaps are in a constant state of flux right now.

It doesn’t look like there will be any more Intel processor releases this year. Instead, we’re expected to hear more early in 2005. At that point the 1066MHz front side bus will become more useful, but even that feature has limited appeal at this point.