How did this happen?

I was looking at an old (4 years old) laptop, and found something interesting. It's an inspiron 5150, 30gb hard drive, 128mb ram, but has a 3.05 ghz Intel Pentium 4 Processor. I know it's bus speeds are slow, and it uses net burst(?), but i'm just wondering how well it works. It seems like one of those scams to get the biggest number.

Edit: haha, i forgot to add the fact that i'm not interesting in purchasing this, my father owns this laptop, and he is not tech-savy at all. I'm was just wondering if he intentionally purchased this CPU to blow away his old laptop or if it was somewhat commonplace to have this processor available.

 

Having alot of power doesn't necessary it's all being put to use, or if it can even be utilized correctly

 

Yeah something doesn't sound right. To me, Netburst is a secondary technology, it won't perform nearly as well as most mobo processors on the market today. I guess you could say it's a cheap solution, if that's what you're looking for.

 

P4's run very hot, net burst was a bad idea it is now gone. I would stay away if it was me.

 

Any core based mobile processor is much faster than the old P4 processors. The 3.06Ghz processor was fast in its day, but it is left in the dust by todays mobile processors.

K-TRON

 

P4 and netburst took Intel down a road that ended in flames because of the heat and let AMD, for a while, take the crown for performance without the heat.

Intel's current Core / Core 2 CPUs are development of the Pentium 3 which was /is more power efficient.

Anyway, the best indicator of the speed of that 3.05GHz P4 is to look at the benchmoark results for other P4 CPUs. I attach SuperPi and wPrime results for a 1.6GHz P4 mobile (in Inspiron 2650). You can compare those results with results for other more recent CPUs by looking at the results table in this review.

The 3.05GHz P4 should be almost twice as fast / half the time of the 1.6GHz unit, which puts it in the same range as a 1.6GHz Pentium M or 1.2GHz Core Solo CPU.

John