Have you ever held your breath for so long that you began to see bright white spots in front of your eyes? It is not hard to imagine that after numerous recalls (MTH, Pentium III 1.13GHz), shortages (seemingly all Pentium III processors at one point or another), and delays (Pentium 4 and i850 chipset); Intel must be feeling the same way. Stiff competition from AMD has kept Intel on their toes, and with the recent release of the 1.2GHz Athlon, we have seen the processor giant fall behind not only in the megahertz war, but also in raw performance.

Undoubtedly Intel has been anticipating the launch of their Pentium 4 for some time. With a brand new micro-architecture, a large increase in frequency, and a revamped system bus we anticipate the Pentium 4 to perform much more competitively than the processors based on the previous P6 architecture.

The day is upon us though, and when it ends, Intel will be able to either breathe a sigh of relief or keep holding their breath for the next big increase in performance. That's correct folks, the long awaited Pentium 4 processor has arrived. We have taken a fully equipped Pentium 4 1.5GHz machine and run it through the most comprehensive series of benchmarks to ever make its way into our lab. How does it compare to Intel's Pentium III 1GHz? How about AMD's 1.2GHz Athlon paired with the 760 DDR chipset? Would you like to super-size that?

You didn't think we were going to give away the conclusion on the first page did you?