Pentium4 Northwood 1.8Ghz - Conclusion
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Company: Intel Corporation
Product: P4 1.8GHz CPU Northwood
Price: Variable, around 215$
Availability: Now
Written by: Mack (SPeeD)
Reviewed: February, 2002
At this point, the P4 1.8GHz Northwood is leaving us a little bit disappointed in the performance arena. What's that you say? Overclock this bad mofo? That's a damn good idea! Lets rock!
Overclocking: Unfortunately, the highest I could possibly get this chip to is 2.169GHz stable. Respectable, but not as high as we had hoped for, since we have seen mad overclocking of this chip, upwards of 2.5GHz with only air cooling. This low overclock is certainly not for lack of good hardware. We are running the Abit BD7 RAID with Kingmax PC2400 which has been run at over 160FSB in our previous AMD setup. Even with the NIC and Soundcards pulled out, we could not get above 120MHz system clock. Again, still getting almost an additional 400MHz out of this chip is quite a bit, just not as high as we had anticipated. Lets take a look at Overclocked Benchmarks.
1.8@2.169GHz
Intel CPUID
I thumbnailed these so you can pull them up separately and compare them to the previous benchmarks at stock SPeeD. To summarize, CPU scores are way ahead of the 2GHz Northwood and compare very favorably towards the AMD XP 1800+ CPU. Multi-Media performance improved quite a bit, and surpasses all other CPU's on the chart. Memory Bandwidth also improved immensely and is only ever so slightly behind RDRAM performance and is quite a bit faster than 845 PC2100, KT266A PC2100 and nForce PC2100. Oh, and I also included a thumbnail of the "official" Intel CPU ID for Intel processors only. Hehe, I love how it says "The Intel processor and system bus appear to be running above their frequency specifications, a condition commonly known as "overclocked". LMAO! You bet your ass it's overclocked, Intel!
Conclusion: We've heard quite a few comparisons between the new P4 Northwood (mostly the 1.6GHz chip) and the old Celeron 300a of days past. This may or may not be a fair comparison. The first system I built was with a Celeron 300a and that was one ROCK solid chip. It would do 450MHz at stock voltage without so much as a hiccup. And 465Mhz with just a slight voltage increase. What was so incredible about this chip, is that it not only had a very good chance at clocking much higher than any other CPU available. It also hung in there with PII 400 and 450MHz chips. Considering the price difference, and Intel's intention of running a paltry 66MHz FSB, this was simply amazing.
This particular chip has missed the boat and I would not classify it as the "next 300a". But on the same token, it's performance is admirable. And overclocking 17% above spec to a mere 2.169Ghz will increase performance by quite a large margin.
Then again, if you end up with a 1.6GHz Northwood and make it to 2.1GHz or higher, you'll have something special on your hands. At the moment, the 1.8GHz Northwood will cost you around 215$, yet an Athlon XP 1800+ runs around 140$. Quite a big difference in price, yet both chips will give you nearly equal performance all around. Bottom line is, I would have to recommend the XP processor if your looking at bang for your buck. Yet, other things to consider are incompatibilities with VIA chipsets and the constant updating of driver sets to work around these problems. Or the overpriced underpowered nForce motherboards, that may enjoy more potential in the future with updated drivers and tweaked hardware. Currently it remains a little too expensive for most peoples tastes and simply did not provide the "VIA killer" performance that some folks predicted it would.
What? You want to see some genuine OCA homebrew pics of this chip? You know we wouldn't leave you with out 'em.
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