Intel has announced the final chapter of its NetBurst architecture with the successor to the Pentium XE 955. Bit-tech runs the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 through it's battery of benchmarks - read on to see the first benchmark with an Intel beating an Athlon in ages.


In multi-threaded video encoding scenarios, the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 trades blows with the Athlon 64 FX-60, but the FX-60 remains the faster of the two on aggregate. In single threaded tests, it performs similarly to the Prescott based Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz. It's no slough, in that respect, but it's not as fast as AMD's single or dual core processors that have a much higher instruction per clock count.

Gaming is a mixed bag at the moment, because almost all of the current shipping games are single threaded, thus showing no tangible benefit to having a dual core processor. However, they don't really show any massive drawbacks either. Quake 4 is one of the first games to show performance benefits for dual core processors. Intel's Pentium Extreme Edition 965 came out on top of the pile in our high-detail test at 1280x1024 - this came as a bit of a surprise to us.

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