It has been more than two months since the Intel Pentium 4 1.5GHz fell under the microscope here at the Sharky Extreme labs of overclocking excellence and political science. As you may remember, we were not exactly bowled over by the results of some our initial test results, and the hefty price tag did not ease the situation. Not a group to get discouraged, however, it was decided that since the Pentium 4 was designed for a high level of scalability, we would push our 1.5GHz engineering sample as far as it would go and see what significant performance increases were available.

Since a locked multiplier limits the Pentium 4, we took benchmarks at several settings in order to represent as many configurations as possible. Additionally, since ASUS' P4T served as the test bed, we were able to run numerous tests at different front side bus speeds in order to get a better idea of how the quad-pumped 100MHz bus affects the overall performance of the Pentium 4. A new feature ASUS has recently added to their BIOS, called RDRAM Turbo, has also been tested - while memory bandwidth certainly is not a limitation of the Pentium 4, we will take all that we can get.

So you have just dropped a couple thousand dollars on the components for a brand new Pentium 4 system - a price tag worthy of a Gianni Versace label, if you will, in the computing industry. Most people would feel perfectly contented knowing that they have 1,500MHz of computing power under the hood. Most people… As we have seen previously, processors are never sold at their operating threshold though; so much of the horsepower is never realized. In essence, your "shiny double breasted suit" is hidden away under some plastic wrapping from a dry cleaner's. If you've never opened up the throttle on that brand new Pentium 4 system, there is a very good chance that a few hundred megahertz are lying there, unused.