Intel Pentium 4 570 review

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Verdict:

The 3GHz Intel Pentium 4 530 is excellent value. It is powerful enough for high-end tasks and is a more powerful chip than its AMD rivals. The 560 and 570 are overpriced, though. Most users would be better off spending a little more on a Pentium 4 600 series or Pentium D processor.

Review Date: 21 Nov 2005

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Our Rating 2 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

Core: Prescott

Frequency: 3.8GHz

Socket: LGA775

Process: 90nm

Cores: One

Instructions: MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3

Multiplier: 19x

External bus: 200MHz

Effective FSB speed: 800MHz

Level 1 cache: 16KB

Level 2 cache: 1,024KB

One of the main advantages of Intel's Pentium 4 is its Hyper-Threading technology. Processors with Hyper-Threading cope better than single-core chips in background tasks such as virus checking as they can run different processes in separate threads.

Some Pentium 4 processors, with model numbers ending in 1, support Intel's EM64T 64-bit instruction set. We tested the Pentium 4 530, 540, 560 and 570 models, with clock speeds ranging from 3 to 3.8GHz.

When running the standard 32-bit version of Windows XP, Intel's Pentium 4 range outperforms AMD's Athlon 64 processors. The cheapest in the group, the £114 Pentium 4 530, is faster than the £129 Athlon 64 3200+ in every benchmark apart from Far Cry, and the £148 Pentium 4 540 is almost as quick in the Shopper benchmarks as the £234 Athlon 64 3800+.

At the top of the range, though, the Pentium 4 560 and 570 face stiff competition from Intel's own Pentium D 820. Unless your motherboard won't accept the dual-core chip, it's a far better buy

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