Previous news

Intel's Prescott chip is not as exciting as people thought it would be. Analysts and the IT press have been distinctly unimpressed. The good news is that the motherboards we use for our high end PCs are the most compatible with the Prescott chip.

Intel's Hyper-threading technology seems to be paying dividends. Most technical websites now rate Intel's CPUs as faster than the AMD equivalents. See our page on AMD processors

Since our last update Intel has released several new processors, going all the way up to the 3.06 GHz Pentium 4. They've also raised the speed of the FSB (Front Side Bus) from 533 MHz to 800 Mhz, so our earlier advice of going for a 478 pin motherboard to protect against future changes already looks outdated as this time though Intel haven't changed the number of pins on the new CPUs they have changed the FSB and if you've got a 478 pin motherboard that supports 533 MHz FSB processors it won't take the new ones :-(

Intel announced two new motherboard chipsets to handle the new 800 FSB processors. These are the 875P (Canterwood) and the 865 (Springdale) chipsets. More here. Most motherboard manufacturers are now building their more expensive motherboards around the 875P, and their cheaper motherboards around the 865 chipsets.

The 3.06 was Intel's first CPU with hyper-threading (read our article on hyper-threading). Since then they've introduced some of their lower end processors with this feature to make a complicated market even more complicated. So now buying a 2.4 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor becomes a major decision as it comes in so many different flavours many of which may not work in your motherboard. You've got the

1. Intel Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz in socket 423 (423 pins) format
2. Intel Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz in socket 478 with 400 FSB (Front Side Bus)
3. Intel Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz in socket 478 with 533 FSB
4. Intel Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz in socket 478 with 800 FSB
5. Intel Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz in socket 478 with hyper-threading ... more to come.

Make sense of it all. Anandtech and Tom's Hardware are good places for more detailed information and test results: