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The P4 has Landed |
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John Morris and Josh Taylor Contributing Editors, AnchorDesk Tuesday, November 21, 2000 |
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To find out what kind of performance you can expect from a system with a 1.5 GHz P4 -- and who really needs one -- we chose the occasion to launch a project of our own, ZDNet's new Desktop Supercenter. There you'll find reviews of five new P4 desktops, as well as three of the latest Athlon systems with processor running at speeds up to 1.2 GHz. Ranging in price from $2,500 to an astounding $4,167, these ultra high-end desktops are absolutely loaded with features, including 128 MB system memory, hard drives up to 75 GB, and the latest graphics cards with 64 MB double data rate (DDR) memory. GORGEOUS DISPLAYS
All of them included gorgeous 19-inch displays and DVD and CD-RW drives, most had awesome speaker systems and a few even had TV/FM tuner cards. To jump directly to our analysis and reviews, see our feature story, The Pentium 4 Has Landed. The Desktop Supercenter also gives ZDNet Labs an opportunity to roll out the latest benchmarks, including new versions of tests that measure performance on popular business productivity and content-creation applications and some video tests we developed specifically for the P4. NEW PERFORMANCE LEVEL
As you might expect from systems with this kind of pedigree, we saw a new level of performance. If you spend all day emailng, browsing the Web and creating documents using Microsoft Office, you won't notice much difference. But for more system-intensive tasks such as 3D graphics, gaming and digital video editing, these high-end systems -- and especially the P4s -- do deliver. RECOMMENDATIONS
Initially, the audience for these systems should be limited. But if you're shopping for that really special someone, here are our current recommendations: The Gateway Performance 1500xl is best all-around. The Compaq Presario 7000Z-1.1, based on the 1.1 GHz Athlon processor, offers similar performance on most tasks and essentially the same features for $750 less, making it a good value. Both systems earn ZDNet's Best Buy award. The IBM NetVista A60i takes the Money's No Object category. It's absolutely loaded with home theater features, though it doesn't offer quite the same level of 3D performance as other P4 desktops. Naysayers will ask who really needs a system this powerful. But let's face it, this isn't a question of needs, as much as wants. We certainly wouldn't mind getting one of these mega-systems for the holidays. TALKBACK
Is the Pentium 4 a real step forward for desktop computing? Or a case of PC overkill? Tell us in Talkback.
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