I don't have anything against overclocking...
But with Athlon's highest Mhz (1.33G socketA) price vs. the lowest Mhz (850mhz socketA) price....well..the difference isn't so bad (the P3 is about the same..the P4 is in it's own little section. Hmm, the P4 is a lot like those old Pentium Pros. Remember those things?). There's, like, a two hundred dollar difference in price between the slowest and the fastest. It used to be a good 800 dollars difference in price, in the good ole days.
And there is no reason to overclock a 1.3G....or a 1.0G for that matter, because there isn't any software that really needs anything faster than that. And as far as games go....the Video Card Can't keep up with anythink over 900mhz.
As far as overclocking a P4? I don't know if it is possible or isn't. It all depends on the motherboard. And as far as I know, there are not that many to choose from. Can't really say if any of them allow overclocking. I also, doubt that the CPU is unlocked. (The 1.2 Athlon C that I bought was unlocked)
I just benched marked my System with SiSoft Sandra 2001.
The CPU Benchmarks Show the P4 1.6:
Dhrystone ALU 3065 MIPS
Whetstone FPU/SSE2 833/1955 MFLOPS
My 1.2:
Dhrystone ALU 3336 MIPS
Whetstone FPU 1607 MFLOPS
I don't know what either really means, but I'm going to guess that SSE2 is that optimize code that everyone is talking about, because it's only found on the P4 Benchmark Comparson chart. If you look at the other numbers. The Athlon 1.2 beats the Intel 1.6. Especially when it comes to the Float Point Calcs.
It's the memory Bench marks that the P4 excells at. My MSI board is well known for it's stablility, and unagressive Memory Timing (I haven't flashed to the 4-way interleaving, "OC" ("overclocking" beta) Bios. So the Benchmarks are a little lower than they can be. I'm waiting for an official release and if none ever comes, and if there is a way to activate the Raid bios...I heard that it doesn't turn on in that beta version...then I'll do the 4-way interleaving flash.)
Intel 850 PC800 CL2 Rdram:
Int ALU/RAM Bandwith 1374 MB/s
Float FPU/RAM Bandwidth 1400 MB/s
My System:
Int ALU/RAM Bandwith 490 MB/s
Float FPU/RAM Bandwidth 554 MB/s
But Rdram has it's problems....which makes it look good on paper, but not so good in the field. However it's still faster than Sdram, and cost four times as much!
I said it before...the only thing that's giving the P4 it's edge to the regular consumers base (people who just look at stats and don't consider the actual performace in real world tests) is the Rdram Hype. If you just look at the CPU speeds, Mhz to Mhz, the Athlon is a generation above the P4. (The P4 is nothing more than a P3 with Rambus, at least, that's what It looks like to me.)
