Our last Intel Pentium 4 processor review was a P4 3.06. Today we're testing the newest processor in the Intel Pentium 4 family, the P4 3.0. You might be wondering why the new Intel P4 runs 60Mhz slower than the last P4. Don't let the slightly slower MHz fool you, this new 3.0 is the fastest Pentium 4 processor thanks to it's record setting 800MHz front side bus.

The new 800MHz front side bus P4 will be available in four speed ranges; 2.4 GHz, 2.6 GHz, 2.8 GHz and our test unit, 3.0 GHz. With the exception of the 800MHz front side bus, these new P4s are pretty much the same as the 533MHz front side bus P4s. Both types of processors have 512K of full speed L2 cache, however all the 800FSB P4s will have support for Hyper-Threading Technology, where as only the 3.06 on the 533 side supports that feature.

To take full advantage of the new 800MHz front side bus, Intel has introduced the news Canterwood 875P motherboard chipset. This new chipset not only put Intel on par with the best AMD motherboard chipset, the nForce2, but it leapfrogs it in many ways. The 875P has support for Dual Channel DDR400 memory, 800MHz front side bus support, AGP 8X, Dedicated network bus for wirespeed Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0 and native Serial ATA 150 with Intel RAID Technology. Intel Performance Acceleration Technology further accelerates performance by reducing memory latencies. These new features provide unmatched system efficiency and raw speed for the most demanding applications and games.

Let's take a closer look at the newest Intel wonder chip and chipset.