Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955 & 975X Express Chipset: 65nm is Here

How we configured our test systems: When configuring the test systems for this review, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults."  The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the drivers necessary for our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system.  Auto-Updating and System Restore were then disabled, and we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

Test System Specifications "Intel & AMD Inside!"

Preliminary Benchmarks with SiSoft SANDRA 2005 Synthetic Testing

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. SANDRA consists of a set of information and diagnostic utilities that can provide a host of useful information about your hardware and operating system. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2005 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Cache, and Memory) with the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 installed into our test rig.  All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speeds of 3.46GHz.

CPU Arithmetic Benchmark Pentium Extreme Edition 955 3.46GHz

Multimedia Benchmark Pentium Extreme Edition 955 3.46GHz

CPU Cache Benchmark Pentium Extreme Edition 955 3.46GHz (DDR2667)

Memory Benchmark Pentium Extreme Edition 955 3.46GHz (DDR2667)

According to SANDRA, the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 is quite a performer. The CPU Arithmetic benchmark puts the 955XE at the head of the pack in regard to FPU performance, and only the Athlon 64 4800+ manages a higher score in the ALU test. In the multimedia benchmark, however, the 955XE ruled the roost besting all of the other reference processors in SANDRA's database. The Cache & Memory benchmark shows the 955XE performing much like a Pentium 6xx series processor, and the memory bandwidth benchmark reported peak bandwidth scores over 6GB/s.