Intel's Pentium XE 965 and 955 Processors

Test Setup & Benchmarks

Test Setup & Benchmarks

To find out if all this feature-talk of the Presler CPUs really made a strong impact, we take Intel's top guns for a spin with AMD's best of the lot. So that encompasses Intel's Pentium XE 965 and 955 against AMD's Athlon 64 FX-60 and FX-57 CPUs along with the Athlon 64 X2 4800+. To have an overview of how much the new Intel processors have progressed from the past, we've also got the Intel Pentium XE 840 and Intel's fastest single-core CPU - the Pentium 4 XE 3.73 GHz. Coincidentally, the latter's clock speeds corresponds with that of the very new Pentium XE 965 processor, so it's going to be interesting to find out to what extent dual-core and more cache has helped improve computing performance.

The components used in the AMD testbed include:-

• ASUS A8V Deluxe (VIA K8T800 Pro chipset)
• AMD Athlon 64 FX-57/FX-60 and Athlon 64 X2 4800+ processor
• 2 x 512MB Corsair DDR400 non-ECC memory modules (CAS 2.5, 3-3-6)
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
• MSI GeForce FX 5700 256MB (AGP) - with NVIDIA Detonator XP 61.34 (beta)
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1

The components used in the Pentium XE 840 and Intel Pentium 4 XE testbed include:-

• Intel D955XBK Desktop Board (Intel 955X Express chipset)
• Intel Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 840 processor (with Hyper-Threading) / Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73 GHz (with Hyper-Threading)
• 2 x 512MB Micron DDR2-533 non-ECC memory modules (CAS 4, 4-4-12)
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
• MSI GeForce PCX 5750 128MB (PCI Express x16) - with NVIDIA Detonator XP 61.34 (beta)
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1

The components used in the Pentium XE 965 and Pentium XE 955 testbed include:-

• ASUS P5WD2-E Premium (Intel 975X Express chipset)
• Intel Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 965 / 955 processors (with Hyper-Threading)
• 2 x 512MB Kingston DDR2-667 non-ECC memory modules (CAS 4. 4-4-10)
• Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)
• MSI GeForce PCX 5750 128MB (PCI Express x16) - with NVIDIA Detonator XP 61.34 (beta)
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 1

The benchmarks used in this review include:-

• BAPCo SYSmark 2004
• SPECCPU 2000 v1.2
• Lightwave 3D 7.5
• Futuremark PCMark 2004 Pro
• Cinebench 2003
• WSTREAM
• XMpeg 4.5 (DivX encoding)
• Futuremark 3DMark03 Pro
• Futuremark 3DMark05 Pro
• Unreal Tournament 2004
• AquaMark3