Unreal Tournament 2003	Source: Epic

Unreal Tournament 2003 is the sequel to 1999's multiple 'Game of the Year' award winner. It uses the very latest Unreal Engine technology - where graphics, sound and game play are taken beyond the bleeding edge. Unreal Tournament 2003 employs the use of Vertex as well as Pixel Shaders and it's recommended that you use a DirectX 8 videocard to get the most out of the game.

UT2003 Demo 640x480 Flyby
	Video Card	FPS	Ranking
1.	Athlon64 3200+	299.5
2.	AthlonXP 3200+	244.64
3.	Pentium 4 3.2C	247.74

UT2003 Demo 640x460 Botmatch
	Video Card	FPS	Ranking
1.	Athlon64 3200+	94.07
2.	AthlonXP 3200+	80
3.	Pentium 4 3.2C	82.81

The Pentium 4 3.2C does relatively well here in UT2003 but the Athlon64 3200+ does better.

It's still very fast...

Even though the Intel Pentium 4 3.2C was out paced by the Athlon64 3200+ in almost all benchmarks it's still an extremely fast performing processor.

If the applications you run take advantage of SSE2, perhaps you might want to stick with an P4 instead of going with an Athlon64 as it seems certain applications don't use the A64's SSE2 instructions properly (ala SysMark2002's Internet Content).

Aside from the newly released Intel Extreme Edition, I think it's safe to assume that the Intel P4 3.2C will probably be the last processor based on the reliable Northwood core... after all we've seen it scale from 1.6 GHz to now 3.2 GHz! Even Intel was only expecting about 3 GHz from the Northwood apparently.

Physically there's no difference between the P4 3.2C and previous Northwood Pentium 4 processors. While the core is fairly protected under the IHS, we would love it if Intel could somehow strengthen the pins on the bottom. As it is right now, when the processor is not in a CPU socket you're going to want to be very careful with it (this stems from a little incident where I accidentally broke off four pins of another chip).

With a retail price of $795 CDN ($590 US), the Intel Pentium4 3.2GHz processor is quite expensive, but in the void created by a lack of Athlon64 processors, it remains a very enticing choice.

Find out about this and many other reviews by joining the Weekly PCstats.com Newsletter today!

Related Articles

Here are a few other articles that you might enjoy as well...

1. Intel Pentium 4 3.0GHz 800MHZ FSB Processor Review
2. Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz Processor Review
3. Athlon64 3200+ 32/64-bit Processor Review
4. AMD AthlonXP 3200+ 400MHz FSB Processor Review
5. Intel Pentium 4 1.6A GHz Review