JC-News had the chance to test Intel Pentium 4 1.7GHz (engineering sample), which is due on April 18, and compared it with the results obtained for AMD Athlon 1.3GHz (266MHz FSB). The test systems were configured as follows:

• Pentium 4 1.7GHz, ASUS P4T (i850), 256MB Samsung PC800 RDRAM.
• Athlon 1.3GHz, ASUS A7M266 (AMD-760), 256MB CL2 PC2100 Micron DDR SDRAM.

Both systems used the same ELSA Gladiac GeForce2 GTS graphics card and IBM DTLA 307030 HDD.
And now let’s pass over to the benchmarks. We would like to offer you some selected benchmarks, namely: 3DMark 2001, 3D Winbench 2000 Processor Test, Quake III Arena, MDK2, Unreal Tournament and Mercedes-Benz Truck Racing.

Benchmark	Pentium 4 1.7GHz	Athlon 1.3GHz
3DMark2001	3207	2989
3D Winbench 2000 Processor Test	2.82	2.86
Quake3 Arena (demo01), 640x480x32	200.3	179.3
MDK2, 800x600x32	180.9	186.9
Unreal Tournament, 800x600x32	52.7	55.8
Mercedes-Benz Truck Racing, 800x600x32	115.7	105.8

Well, in all the tests the results were comparable: the performance difference between the CPUs didn’t exceed 10%.
Judging by what was obtained we have to state that elder AMD Athlon CPUs still look much more attractive from the point of view of price-to-performance ratio. Intel babies seem to be less beautiful in this respect: expensive RDRAM, expensive i850 based mainboards and the cost of the CPU itself, which has always been higher than that of elder AMD Athlon CPUs.
We dare suppose that this situation is very unlikely to change until Pentium 4 chipsets supporting DDR SDRAM appear (Pentium 4 + PC133 SDRAM doesn’t see logical to us, since this memory has very narrow memory bus). And according to what we know about Intel’s roadmap, these chipsets can be expected only in November – December 2001 at the earliest.