Intel's Latest: Faster, but Still Not the Champ

Intel is by no means conceding the high-end market to AMD's FX line (see "First Tests: FX-60 Powers Superfast PCs"), having recently launched its high-end dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition 955 CPU. No manufacturer was ready to ship a 955-based PC in time for this article, so we built a reference system featuring the processor and Intel's new 975X Express chip set.

Our test machine's WorldBench 5 score of 109 was more than 10 percent higher than that of any other dual-core Intel-based PC we've evaluated, but our reference system lagged behind the fastest FX-60-based machines in WorldBench 5 performance by a significant margin (23 percent).

More Cache, Faster Bus

Intel's new dual-core 3.46-GHz chip, which will sell for about $1000, carries 2MB of Level 2 cache per core (twice the amount the Pentium Extreme Edition 840 holds).

Other new features in the Extreme Edition 955 include a faster frontside bus (running at 1066 MHz) connecting the CPU with RAM, and Intel's Virtualization Technology, which allows a PC with the appropriate software to run multiple operating systems simultaneously without having to reboot.

Built by the Test Center

We equipped our reference desktop with an Intel D975XBS motherboard; 2GB of DDR2-887 RAM from Crucial Technologies; a single EVGA e-GeForce 7800 GTX KO graphics card with 256MB of memory; a couple of 7200-rpm, 160GB Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600JS hard drives striped in a RAID 0 array; and an Antec Turbo-Cool 510 ATX-PFC power supply.

How soon will systems be available commercially? Alienware and Gateway have already announced high-end models based on Intel's newest processor, and several other vendors likely will have joined them by the time you read this.