Conclusions
With apologies to the P4 Extreme Edition, the Pentium 4 570J may well be the all-around fastest Pentium 4 processor. If not, it's close enough. The 570J will list for $637—not a bargain by any stretch, but well below the Extreme's $999 price tag.

That price also puts the P4 570J just below the Athlon 64 3800+, which lists for $643 and is selling for about that. Based on our overall performance numbers, that sounds about right. The Athlon 64 3800+ walloped the 570J in nearly every gaming and graphics test we threw at it, but the 570J pulled out a higher score in WorldBench on the strength of good performance in media encoding apps and MS Office.

The Pentium 4 570J is a solid choice for those who simply don't care about gaming, graphics, or running older programs with lots of x87 floating-point math. Right now, though, AMD's Athlon 64 processors offer more balanced overall performance with fewer obvious weaknesses, less heat production, and more frugal power consumption. The Athlon 64 also has a couple of key technology advantages still, including AMD's 64-bit extensions. The Pentium 4 won't gain similar capabilities, in the form of Intel's EM64T extensions, until the P4 600 series debuts early next year.