Intel Extreme Edition 955 Review
Although a bit early it seems, CNET has posted their review of the Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955 (Presler) CPU. Using the soon to be announced 975X Express chipset, this new Intel platform provided some promising performance numbers which took a chunk out of AMD's performance lead. Add some significantly reduced power consumption and this new platform begins to look much more appealing than current Intel offerings. You can see what Marco thought of Intel's latest platform by reading Hot Hardware's latest review.
Although it shows some promise, we had hoped to see more initial performance gains from the Extreme Edition 955 chip. It certainly exhibits some improvement compared to Intel's older Pentium D dual-core chips, but AMD's Athlon 64 X2 CPUs still hold a clear advantage over all of Intel's chips--young and old, alike--on our gaming and MP3-encoding benchmarks. We were also surprised by the results of our multitasking test. We ran a McAfee virus scan concurrently with a DivX 6.1 video encode, and AMD beat Intel's new chip by 4 percent. Intel's counter is that its dual-core chips will shine with heavier workloads. And while it's perhaps not uncommon for your PC to have five or six major applications open at one time, rarely will they all perform different tasks simultaneously.
