X-bit labs

Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840 Dual-Core CPU Review (page 8)

Category: CPU

by Ilya Gavrichenkov

[ 05/17/2005 | 09:19 PM ]

Here the test is emulating the user’s work when he is receiving an e-mail in Outlook 2002 with a number of documents in a zip-file attached to it. While the files are being scanned for viruses with the VirusScan 7.0, the user is looking through the e-mails and makes noted in the Outlook calendar. After that the user checks a corporate web-site and some documents through Internet Explorer 6.0.

Although dual-core Athlon 64 X2 outperforms Athlon 64 FX-55 working at higher core clock rate in this test, the situation with Intel processors is just the opposite. Pentium Extreme Edition 840 falls behind the single-core Pentium 4 processors because of its much lower working frequency. Moreover, we shouldn’t forget that the regular Pentium 4 processors are already optimized for multi-threaded environments: they support Hyper-Threading technology.

In this test the hypothetical user is editing some test in Word 2002 and uses Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6 to convert an audio file into a text document. The document is then converted into pdf-format in Acrobat 5.0.5. After that the prepared document is used to create a PowerPoint 2002 presentation.

Just like in the previous case Pentium Extreme Edition 840 cannot compete with its single-core fellows as well as with the dual-core competitors.

In the next test we see the following situation: the user opens a database in Access 2002 and creates a number of requests. The documents are archived with WinZip 8.1. The request results are exported into Excel 2002 and a diagram is created.

Again we have to complain about the low clock frequency of the dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition 840. They are about 15-20% slower from this point of view as the Pentium 4 solutions that is why they fail to show worthy results in this test.

So, we can conclude with all certainty basing on the obtained results that it doesn’t make sense to use dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition 840 for typical office work. Almost in all cases single-core Intel solutions proved faster than the newcomer. The only case where Pentium Extreme Edition 840 revealed its potential was during a complex test with multiple applications running simultaneously.