- Reviewed with: Windows XP Home edition
- Also available for: Any Windows or Linux operating system (although only Windows XP and some versions of Linux are built to take advantage of the processor's hyper-threading technology).
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- The Good: A well-built and well-designed PC with lots of useful features and enormous computing power; extremely simple setup; 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 chip has Intel's hyper-threading technology, which can boost power by more than 25 per cent over a standard chip running at the same clock speed and provide true, stable multitasking on the desktop; comes with DVD and CD-RW drives; system has a wealth of built-in bells and whistles, from front-mounted audio and USB ports, to gigabit ethernet and high-end audio/video capabilities.
- The Bad: The substantial premium for a Pentium 4 chip with hyper-threading technology puts it beyond the financial reach of many users for now; system has USB 1.1 rather than 2.0, and no FireWire; only three PCI slots.
- The Verdict: It's an expensive piece of equipment, but if you can afford it and want the latest and greatest desktop computer to turbocharge both your work and play, this system is cutting edge.
REVIEW:
Computer manufacturers have offered few attention-grabbing innovations in recent years, aside from packing more power into the box. The faster processors haven't necessarily been enough to persuade home and business users to dash out and upgrade, since most PCs built in the past few years still have enough power to run almost anything except the most demanding graphics, video and game software. But Intel's latest processor, the Pentium 4 chip running at 3.06 GHz, uses a technology called hyper-threading (HT) that is going to make a lot of people start thinking about a new system again.
The 3.06 GHz P4 machines aren't widely found at retail yet because they're still cutting-edge hardware with a high price tag compared to mainstream PCs. For this review, Globetechnology.com checked out a top of the line package from Cicero (Future Shop's house brand, built by Canadian integrator Seanix). Basically it's a desktop dream machine for work or play, offering a wealth of features and the best desktop performance money can buy at the moment.
The final price of the Cicero depends on the configuration - how much RAM you get, the size of the hard drive, the speed of the video card, and so on. The mid-tower configuration we looked at ranges from about $2,000 and up, depending on what type of drives you have, the amount of memory, and so on.
The PC's 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 hyper-threading chip, which has 512K of cache memory and a wickedly fast 533 MHz front-side bus, runs on an Intel D845GERG2LK motherboard. It has on-board sound and a gigabit ethernet adapter, as well as an AGP slot for high-end graphics cards.
The Cicero's motherboard is well equipped, but I had a couple of beefs. First, it had just three PCI slots, which limits how many upgrade cards you can install. The USB technology was also version 1.1 rather than the much faster USB 2.0 standard, and there was no FireWire/IEEE 1394 port. You can remedy the FireWire/USB 2.0 shortcomings easily with add-on PCI cards, but this will eat up a couple of your precious PCI slots.
The Cicero was set up with 1GB of PC2100 DDR memory, separate CD-RW (40X CD-R, 12X CD-RW, 48X CD) and DVD (16X) drives, and a roomy 80GB hard drive spinning at 7,200 rpm. The strange thing, though, is that the drive is configured for the old FAT32 file system, rather than the more stable, secure and efficient NTFS system. Switching the drive to NTFS once the operating system has been installed is a hassle, but I assume they configured the system this way in case people wanted to set up a dual-boot operating system with a older version of Windows, since it's a bit easier to convert a FAT32 hard drive to NTFS than to go the other way.
The computer was also configured with an ATI Radeon 8500 LE video card with 128MB of DDR memory and both TV- and DV-out ports. The Radeon 8500 is not ATI's top card - at the time of this review, that honour went to the 9700 Pro - but it's a decent all-around video accelerator for gaming and multimedia playback. The 8500 delivers more than enough performance for all but the most discriminating power-users and power-gamers.
The case layout on the Cicero is excellent. Besides the usual headphone, microphone and USB ports on the back of the machine, there is also a duplicate set on the front of the case, located near the bottom of the front panel where they are much easier to get at. The mid-tower has three bays, plus a moulded slot for the floppy drive.
The case is designed for good airflow, so there's little chance of high-performance processors or video card chips overheating. The fans are slightly noisy, though, producing noticeable background noise in a quiet room. The 300 watt power supply is chunky enough to handle a lot of add-on drives and peripherals, a point many people overlook when buying a PC - some vendors cut corners by installing smaller power supplies, which limits your upgrade options later on.
This case is also a dream to work on if you're doing an upgrade or repair. The left and right side panels both slide off for easy access, giving you a full view of the machine's guts and access to both of the mounting rails for drives. There's lots of room inside the case, so you don't have to worry about cards butting up against drives and things of that nature. And instead of the usual screws to secure the covers, which require you to haul out a screwdriver every time you want to take a peek inside the case, the designers used screw-down pins with large steel heads that you can fasten or loosen easily by hand.
The black-and-silver machine also came with an optical mouse, a really nice enhanced Internet keyboard with programmable shortcut keys, and stereo speakers. The comprehensive software bundle included Burning-ROM (for CD-Rs), Microsoft Works 7.0, Win DVD 2000 4.0, and Cicero's system recovery utilities. The operating system that came with the box was Microsoft's Windows XP Home.
The operating system and most of the software was pre-installed, except for Works. Since it's a Future Shop machine, there were also several promotional desktop shortcuts taking you to the Future Shop on-line store and its digital photo-reprint service.
Setup was simple, following the clearly written Cicero setup poster's nine steps. Basically you plug in the power cord, mouse, keyboard and speakers, and a modem or network cable if you choose. Then you boot the PC, and the operating system walks you through the time/date and user information screens, as well as any necessary network, modem or broadband connection settings to get you onto the Internet. The whole setup process, from opening the box to surfing the Web, took me less than 10 minutes. Its such a simple and straightforward setup that even a novice should be finished easily within about 20 minutes.
The Processor
Now for the heart of this PC powerhouse - the processor. A 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 chip offers a whole heck of a lot of speed, but it doesn't come cheap. The chip alone retailed in the $700 to $800 (U.S.) range when this review was published - substantially more than an entire mid-range PC.
Looked at solely in terms of raw megahertz, in my view the new P4 doesn't add enough CPU cycles to justify paying such a substantial premium over Intel's more mainstream 2.66 GHz or 2.8 GHz chips, which sell for about half as much. (Note: Don't confuse the Pentium 4 with Intel's Celeron processor, a "light duty" chip that sells for less than $90 in the 2 GHz range - the Celeron is fine for entry level PCs, but megahertz-for-megahertz it offers significantly less performance than the heavy-duty Pentium 4 family of chips.)
But while paying double the price of a mainstream P4 chip in order to get the relatively small boost in CPU speed may turn some people off this chip at first glance, on closer inspection you'll find there's more than megahertz under the hood here. The chip's hyper-threading technology is going to be well worth the premium to some - in fact, I'm betting that gamers, heavy multimedia users and graphics professionals will be putting it at the top of their "gotta have" list the next time they upgrade.
Here's why. If you put two chips with an identical megahertz rating side by side, one with and one without hyper-threading, HT alone can boost PC performance by up to 26 per cent on existing programs such as Adobe's Photoshop, Windows MovieMaker and XMPEG with DIVX, according to Intel's benchmarks. The gains are even higher with programs that are specially tweaked for HT.
Intel developed hyper-threading for its Xeon server and workstation chips, and now it is bringing it down to the desktop PC level with the 3.06 GHz Pentium 4. The technology basically allows an HT-capable operating system to treat a powerful chip as if it were two separate processors.
Why would you want to do this? The primary reasons are efficiency and greater program stability when you're running a number of programs simultaneously. Using the SPECintP2000 benchmark for integer performance, for example, a 1 GHz P4 turns in a score of 407, while a 2 GHz chip clocks in at 640, an increase of just over 200 points. But boost the speed by another 1 gigahertz and add in HT technology, and the score jumps to 1,098.
HT makes a processor more efficient, because it allows a second program "thread" to use idle processor cycles when the chip is waiting for more information from the disk or memory subsystems in order to finish processing the first thread it started working on. (A thread is basically a string of instructions in a program that flows through the processor). In short, hyper-threading provides for true multitasking at the hardware level.
To illustrate this, have you ever tried to surf the Web or play an MP3 or video file while burning a CD-R in the background? Chances are your disc ended up as a shiny coaster and your music or video were choppy, because a standard processor has trouble juggling the jobs and keeping a steady flow of data to all the programs that are running. A CPU tends to choke up when too many things are asked of it at the same time, and the performance of all the programs suffers.
A hyper-threaded system, on the other hand, can balance processor resources between different applications that are running simultaneously. This means the CD-R burning program gets the processing power it needs, as would the MP3 or video player, and the result is that more than one program can run smoothly at the same time.
Programs that have been specially developed to run on hyper-threaded processors can go one step further, taking advantage of processor cycles that would otherwise go unused by less efficient, standard chips as they struggled to manage a number of tasks at once. The HT-optimized programs are basically broken down into a number of interwoven threads instead of running as a single, more linear task, so the processor can run the program more quickly.
Games benefit too. High-end games put a lot of strain on the CPU as it processes graphics instructions and audio files, accesses in-game databases, and (for on-line games) manages a network connection. Hyper-threading can help the PC manage all these jobs more efficiently, which means games will usually run faster and smoother.
For businesses, hyper-threading means that IT departments can run maintenance, backup, monitoring and support programs in the background without hampering the main programs users need to actually do their job. It also means a user will get better response from their machine when they're running a combination of business applications, Internet-based software (such as browsers, e-mail and streaming audio/video programs), and have things like virus scanners, encryption systems and software firewalls humming away in the background.
Intel gives the example of an employee working on a CRM program while a complex spreadsheet is calculated - with HT, both jobs can happen simultaneously, rather than the processor having to finish one before turning its attention to the other. Using Outlook and Winzip together, according to the benchmarks, HT adds a 54-per-cent speed boost. People running a PowerPoint presentation, VirusScan and Adobe Acrobat together will see a 24 per cent speed increase on a HT machine when compared to the same processor without HT.
The caveat, though, is that the operating system has to support hyper-threading. Windows XP and some versions of Linux have this support, but older versions of Microsoft's operating system family don't. If you don't plan to run XP or the appropriate version of Linux now or in the near future, you'll probably be better off buying a cheaper P4 without hyper-threading.
If you do run XP, you can take advantage of hyper-threading immediately. You don't have to change the way you do things on the desktop - just run your existing software, and the hyper-threading technology does its thing behind the scenes to make your system run faster and with fewer lockups or crashes.
I tested the 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 chip in the Cicero system by running a CD-R burning program in the background while playing a game (the highly demanding Unreal Tournament 2003), and then a small video window while doing some touch-ups to a digital picture in Adobe Photoshop. The result was smooth video playback and a much-improved photo, and a great score along with a flawlessly burned CD.
I also tried a variety of games on their own, and was blown away by the Cicero P4's abilities. For example, I cranked Unreal Tournament 2003's settings up to maximum (ignoring the pop-up messages that this could "seriously impact the system's performance") and settled in for a frag-fest. On most systems, the frame rate would be fairly low and jerky at those settings, but on the Cicero the gameplay was seamless and silky smooth, with stunning graphics and no lag whatsoever.
In fact, during the entire review test period, the machine was stable and quick no matter what combination of programs were run on it. Windows XP generally improves on prior versions of Microsoft's operating system family in terms of stability, and the 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 chip seems to make it even more solid.
Conclusion
The Cicero (Future Shop) 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 is a very pricey machine by today's standards, costing around three times the price of a basic entry-level system. Much of this extra cost is due to the premium being paid for the new Intel HT-capable chip. But hyper-threading is a technology that can help you get the most out of a Windows XP or Linux computer, making it faster, more efficient and more stable, and allowing you to do true multitasking. If you're looking for a machine to turbocharge your desktop for work or play and make it faster and more stable when multitasking - and you're able to absorb the price tag - a Pentium 4 3.06 GHz machine like the Cicero is definitely worth checking out.