X-bit labs

X-bit Watch: First Intel Prescott Benchmarks Available!

Category: Other

by Anton Shilov

[ 11/16/2003 | 01:24 PM ]

The week before Comdex Fall kick off was not really exciting and there were not a lot of interesting reviews or highly-important news, but we still managed to find something fascinating read for your pleasure.

The article of the week is definitely the Intel Pentium 4 with SSE3 technology review at a Chinese web-site called OCHeaven. The boys had managed to get Intel’s Prescott chip with 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, 1MB of L2 cache, HT technology and 13 new SSE3 instructions to test it against the currently available Pentium 4 processors at 2.80GHz as well as at 3.20GHz. The results they received are quite surprising – in some benchmarks the Prescott 2.80GHz performed nearly as fast as conventional Pentium 4 CPU at 3.20GHz, in others it was behind the 2.80GHz Northwood microprocessor. Read the English version of the review here. 

AnandTech this week continued to examine rather extraordinary notebooks for gamers. Surely, these machines are just desktop replacement portable computers with loads of raw power inside the relatively small size of the box. Check out their Voodoo Envy M:855 review right now.

Have you ever thought about the cars of the 21^st century, e.g. cars that emerge in 2025? Well, it is predicted that those vehicles will come equipped with Wi-Fi, personal computer, GPS and maybe even Windows for Automobiles. Want to read more analysis on the matter? Head over BusinessWeek.  

If you know the past, you will certainly know the future. FastSilicon.com has an article covering the history of graphics processors from 1996 to 2003 – the way from the Voodoo Graphics to the RADEON 9800 XT. Refresh your memory and feel some nostalgia over here. 

Geek.com has prepared a short review of HP’s first iPAQ Pocket PC with built-in keyboard – the iPAQ 4350. Even though the new PDA from HP is an excellent choice, it still has some drawbacks you can read about over here. 

If you use an NVIDIA GeForce FX-based graphics card, you may be interested in unofficial ForceWare 52.70 drivers located here at 3DChipset. If you are more than concerned about playing latest 3D games on your MOBILITY RADEON using drivers for desktop VPUs, locate a special utility to transform desktop drivers into mobile here.

If you are tremendously excited about PC gaming, but are not sure what hardware should you get for best experience, check out a new service from Microsoft and Futuremark called Windows XP Game Advisor.