Probably would have been a bit more fair to have included what you could "easily oc" on the X2 4800 as well. It might not have been super high, but if you just took what a "light" overclock would reach on the 4800 you'd have had an apples to apples comparison.

The counter to that is most readers have seen those kinds of numbers already so it's not a big issue.

:)

Also, though its cool to see how you can reach 4.27ghz on a Intel dual core, I don't think 79C load temeprature should be considered a succesful temperature, as thats borderline throttling/ shutting down. The official max temp said 68C right? 11C over that doesn't seem like a very good temperature to have your CPU running at.

Expected a little bit more detail on the powerdraw comparison.

would be nice to see the idle and load power draw efficiencies in graphs for both the new 9xx series and the older amd/intel series.

very insightful though the load temps with 4.26 were way outside normal safe temperature range adn would ultimately shorten the life of the processor drastically.

Well I again can see that you do a half assed review, as you only use an older 955x Mobo and not the I975 Chipset that was made to be used with the 955EE Pressler. You guys really are AMD Fanboys. BTW I have a 3.73EE on a P5N32-SLI with 2GBs of Corsair PC2-8000UL(1000MHz) and I beat every Single Core that AMD has to offer. You guys suck.

@Raptor Man
"You beat"??? doing what?
You probably need to check Futuremark Hall of Fame to see which brand has all top scores....
http://www.futuremark.com/community/halloffame/
I don't think you can even get close to them, sorry.

FX60 is 120W?
Althrough it is very diffieult for 4800+ to reach 2.7G without any additional cooling involved, 4800+@2.7G is less than 130W.

A good review in general. Should have probably used a 975X though along with Corsair TWIN2X1024A-5400UL 3-3-2-8 memory though. Then we'd get a better picture of where the platform really falls. With that much clocking room Intel really should have launched at 3.73GHz. Getting 2 3.73GHz for the price of 1 currently would be a good deal.

I'd like to see X-Bit so a memory bandwidth comparison like they did for their DDR2 memory reviews. It'd be interesting to see how the 955EE performs moving from 533MHz to 667MHz to 711MHz to 800MHz to 889MHz at the lowest latencies which the i975X all supports. 1067MHz is also supported but I don't think current RAM can reach that high though.

The 955EE will have to rely on overclocking to perform though since the FX-60 should overtake it at base clock when it's released. Supposedly, the FX-60 will be priced 20% more expensive though.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ dual channel support and
DDR2 support jajajajajaj the king is AMD

It seems Intel gave up too early. They should have focused on their clock speed and lowering heat

"There isn’t much to say about the Extreme Edition 955 or Intel’s Presler architecture. The performance numbers show it all, AMD is still king..."
http://www.sudhian.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=723&pid=2806

"Ultimately, although the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 improves upon Intel's previous flagship dual-core offering in virtually every way, AMD still has an edge in our opinion with the Athlon 64 X2..."
http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx

"There is only one test in our suite where the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 is faster than the Athlon 64 X2 4800+..."
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2005/12/27/intel_pentium_e e_955/8.html

Howmuch did Intel pay for this review?
Oh, and by the way, you should compare it with AMD's M2! I recall that Voodoo PC president said people will be shocked when M2 hits the street...

The only thing I don't like about this review is the fact you threw in an overclocked result on the Intel CPU to skew the graph.

Forgot to add...How come you didn't test VT?

Xen supports it now.

Including the overclocked results just misleads people. Either don't include it, or also include results of an overclocked 4800+.

eh, better than the previous stuff, but still not blow you away performance as Intel seemed to be hinting at.
You also said the the 65nm process would allow Intel "to produce a cheaper cpu." Looking at Intel's history, Intel has never produced their top of the line cpus at anything but cheap. It should be more like "the 65nm process would give Intel a better profit."
Not to be an AMD fanboy, but I'm just not too impressed at the moment.

Biased review:
1st - You didn’t overclock the AMD processor...

2nd - How about the Power Consumption numbers of the 4.26 Ghz two processor packing numbers...

3rd - "...can easily shake AMD’s position in the dual-core market segment"
I don’t think this is a dual core processor, and people like you must educate people, or people will be a bunch of morons, this is a two processor packing, not a dual core processor, investigate, learn and teach. I would like to know what you think about Yonah ? Is it right to call Yonah Dual core as it is for Presler?
This is very important because if some company (AMD for example) could put 8 cores on one package, is it an 8 core processor?

No matter what the review says, it would be very sad for you Intel fan boys to know that no Intel dual core Chip will EVER come close what AMD is to release soon. If this is the shocker that Intel had been hiding all these while, the I'm greatly disappointed. It's no surprise that Intel don't compare their chips to AMD because that comparism would be suicidal. Moreover, Intel wants to capture the minds of the gamers, and gaming applications are not multi-threaded for now. If hyperthreading is disabled, Intel chips will perform better. It means that AMD is right by saying hyperthreading is a useless technology on Intel chips. As someone had said, AMD chips on Socket M2 comes the New Destroyer. To me this chip is still no rival for AMD at all.

Netburst is dead, thank god in about 6 months. 5 years of one technology in computing makes it a dinosaur. But 65nm REALLY takes the tarnish off Netburst for this last iteration.

I agree with another commenter that comparing overclocked units is patently ridiculous; that is unless you also include the "stock" performance. Xbit did so no foul.

But let's quit talking about AMD's on-die memory controller; Yonah showed comparable computing power at 40% less power draw and NO on-die memory controller. Maybe Intel's engineers have had it right all along - AMD is optimized for gaming as we all know, but if we can get comparable performance and not have to upgrade our processor just to take advantage of the latest RAM technologies then it is a big win.

For releasing such power gobbler, heat maker, expensive processor? The performance at any cost is something of the past and you did not insist enough on that. Are you scared of something or Satan Clara boyz or just environmentally unfriendly?

You guys saying that they are getting paid off by Intel or are afraid of them are being immature and unfair. The results speak for themselves, and in the benchmarks this processor did show itself to be quite competitive with the current AMD offerings.

The author correctly brought up the AMD is about to release a new processor in the FX-60, and brought up the heat/power problems with the P7 core. The author even brought up the main reason for being impressed was "especially" in comparison to the 840.

What else did you want? The performance was pretty even, and the new AMD processor and heat problems of the P7 were mentioned. So, why are people complaining it is biased? Are you so childish that anything said positively, even when properly qualified, about the opposing company must show a bias or be part of a conspiracy.

On one hand, I do agree including an overclocked processor is not a great idea, because it is not apples to apples, and the overclockability of individual processor is widely variable. So, I can see why the AMD folks might be a little put off by that, but I think it is just bad judgement and not a deliberate bias. On the other hand, not using the 975 chipset can be considered a bias against Intel, and could have improved results (although, depending upon where you read it, some report the 955 and 975 have essentially the same performance, but this seems debatable for the moment).

At any rate, this release says nothing positive about the P7 and something positive about Intel manufacturing. Intel always gets the jump on AMD and it translates to advantages. Although, in this case, with the crappy P7 core, it really translates to lessening disadvantages. Still, even with the superior manufacturing of Intel, you have roughly equal processing speed today, with vastly higher power consumption. This is still pretty pathetic for Intel. What is worse, AMD is soon to release a faster processor that will likely remove the relative performance parity that exists today, leaving Intel with a slower and horribly power hungry processor, despite being manufactured with finer lithography.

So, this may be a positive step for Intel, but they are still in a dreadfully bad position vis-a-vis the Athlon 64. This processor didn't really change that much, despite the improvements it had over its predecessor. But then, all these points were mentioned, although less colloquially, in the conclusion by the author.