I've alluded to this in the last few P4 board reviews I've conducted, the fact that I'm firmly convinced that this is Intel's year to "unscrew" themselves. While Intel may not particularly care for that appelation, I feel it's true. We've seen many changes in the market that I feel better position the P4 as the platform of choice. It's been an evolution really, but the key factors I felt needed to be in place are as follows.

- Socket478. We all knew from the outset that Socket423 would be a short lived platform, and that as much as anything, helped AMD gain ground. Good riddance to a short lived, dead end socket.

- DDR. Now that DDR is being embraced by intel (the 845D and 845E chipsets, not to mention the ET7500 in the Xeon world) as a viable memory platform, we can all breath a sigh of relief. For both philisophical as well as plain old price reasons, it's good to see the choices broaden from "Rambus or nothing". Not that Rambus is inherently bad (let's not revisit the arguments, it's been done already), but more to the point that DDR is the better mainstream choice for numerous reasons.

- 533 bus. 533 bus? arent all P4's running on a Quad pumped 100fsb for 400mhz of speed? That's yesterdays news! :)

Today, we take a look at two CPU's from Intel, the 2.4B and 2.53B (the "B" denotes the new native bus speed of 533mhz). With the additional FSB, Intel has really solidified it's lead, and placed the ball squarely back in AMD's court. It's going to be an interesting year! :)

First we'll segue into the differences brought to the table here, and meander around some good ol' CPU design philosophy, before we get into benchmarks.....