Quake III Team Arena

Quake III Arena

Conclusion: Extreme Edition Remains Questionable

In the majority of gaming benchmarks, the P4EE is not able to clearly outperform AMD's Athlon 64 FX-53. The extra 66 MHz of speed and the boosted Front Side Bus on their own are not enough to create a significant enhancement compared to the 3.4 GHz model with FSB800. The reason is the three-stage cache architecture of the Pentium 4 EE, which already produces more performance compared to the standard Pentium 4. On the other hand, the Extreme Edition remains strong at audio/video encoding tasks.

We already explored what is possible with a system running on faster DDR2 memory a few months ago. In this context, we hope for Intel's full support for DDR2-677, as the 925XE only really reaches peak form with the faster memory. The regular P4 should benefit more from the accelerated platform, which could take away altogether the pricey Extreme Edition's already shaky grounds for existing.