And in conclusion, professional applications:

It’s useless to compete with the overclocked Pentium 4 2.4C in rendering speed. Hyper-Threading technology support allows this CPU to run really fast here.

Still, the high performance of one application is not the main advantage of Hyper-Threading. The most important thing is that you can run a few applications simultaneously and they will not disturb one another. For example, I turned on video capturing on the testbed and at the same time played Serious Sam 2. Hyper-Threading did its job well: the game ran smoothly and there were no dropped frames during the video capture running in parallel. When I tried to do the same on the Athlon XP 3200+ based system, I got 30% of all frames missing and the game was far from playable.

Overall, whatever AMD fans may say, Hyper-Threading is a tricky, but useful thing, and I consider it an advantage that the slower Pentium 4 CPU models have it now.

Conclusion

So, the low-end model of the renewed Pentium 4 series, Pentium 4 2.4C with the 800MHz bus and Hyper-Threading support, is a real bargain for overclockers. Counting out about $180 for the CPU and $120 for the mainboard, you get the fastest system without any big risk or much effort. Of course, the history chronicles better overclockability in a relative measure, but from the point of view of getting the fastest system at the lowest price Pentium 4 2.4C stands unrivalled today.

At the same time we should note that the arrival of overclockable Pentium 4 2.4C CPUs doesn’t mean the end of the Athlon XP 1700+ overclocking epoch. Low-end models from AMD are much cheaper and will surely remain the best choice for overclockers with a small financial budget.