Pentium 4 Prescott gets extremely painful thrashing

HEXUS.NET has reviewed a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 Prescott chip and find it not to its liking. The site says "spending big bucks now may prove to be a foolhardy decision in the near future", which is unlikely to endear the site to the Intel Spinolas. It says its performance is indifferent, its availability is constrained, it has heat problems, and lacks the ability to upgrade. Other than that, it's simply wonderful. It doesn't appear to be a CPU, it appears to be a Bunter. Yaroo! Here.

Those crazy French guys at X86-secret reckon they've taken a 2GHz Pentium M Dothan and overclocked it to 2.4GHz with little effort at all. They claim it's now as fast [sizzling? Ed.] as a P4 3.4GHz or an Athlon 64 3400+. Is the 3400+ out yet? [No, Ed.] Here.

Our friends at AMD Zone report that Bill Gates is really really up-beat about 64-bit X86 microprocessors. So will Longhorn be a 64-bit OS? No one is entirely sure, as yet.

Tom's Hardware has a closer look at the Dothan Pentium M, along with a mass of benchmarks and the rest. But a direct comparison between the Banias Pentium M and the Dothan 2GHz shows that there's no great leap forward with only a five per cent advantage. That's not so brilliant. Here.

And old friend Paolo Corsini at Italian site Hardware Upgrade also has an analysis of the Pentium M Dothan on his pages today. There seems to be something wrong. Paolo tells us that Dothan has a lower battery life than Banias because its TDP at 600MHz is 7.5 watts, compared with Banias' six watts. But it may last longer when Dothan isn't clock throttled. Sheesh!

Scurrying over to the Boy Wonder's site, we notice it has a review of a Foxconn motherboard for the Athlon 64 microprocessor. We saw Foxconn at SBS 2004 last week and it really seems to be making a big effort to show its public face. The motherboard review is here.

Billy Gruff Kylie at HardOCP takes a look at the Via K8T800 Pro technology and finds it to their satisfaction, here.

Sudhian has a gander at Nvidia's Nforce 2 400GB and NF3 250 for the AMD Athlon XP and 64 microprocessors, in this round up, here.

Security, insecurity - call it what you will, it seems like it's here to stay. Everything USB has a review of the Kanguru Wizard USB security key review, here.

At TechWare Labs there be a review of the Palm One Treo 600 CDMA PDA telephonic apparatus.

Bit-Tech, reviewers of screws to the gentry of Oxford, Cambridge, Harrow and Eton, have decided to review a Zalman Surround Sound Head Amp, here. Where's your column, Harris?

Meanwhile, the Right Honourable Spode of the famous Abode lets us know about the SilverStone STT-LC02, in this review here.

Happy wibbling! µ