Testbed and Methods

Since Pentium Extreme Edition 965 has now become the newest Intel product for hardware enthusiasts with unlimited budget, our goal today would be to compare its performance against its primary direct competitor. From the price prospective, this rival is none other but AMD Athlon 64 FX-60. So, we are going to pay special attention to this battle of the giants. And to make this test session even more exciting, we will also include the previous Pentium Extreme Edition 955 processor model and the top Pentium D processor model with 950 rating.

So, we assembled a few test platforms from the following components:

• CPU:
• AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (Socket 939, 2.6GHz, 2x1024KB L2 cache, E4 core revision – Toledo);
• Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965 (LGA775, 3.73GHz, 2x2MB L2);
• Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955 (LGA775, 3.46GHz, 2x2MB L2);
• Intel Pentium D 950 (LGA775, 3.4GHz, 2x2MB L2).
• Mainboards:
• DFI LANParty UT NF4 SLI-DR Expert (NVIDIA nForce4 SLI);
• ASUS P5WD2-E Premium (LGA775, Intel 975X Express).
• Memory:
• 2048MB DDR400 SDRAM (Corsair CMX1024-3500LLPRO, 2 x 1024 MB, 2-3-2-10);
• 2048MB DDR2-667 SDRAM (Corsair CM2X1024-6400PRO, 2 x 1024 MB, 4-4-4-12).
• Graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT (PCI-E x16).
• HDD: Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB (SATA150).
• OS: Microsoft Windows XP SP2 with DirectX 9.0c.

The tests were run with the BIOS settings adjusted for the maximum performance.