Pricing, Overclocking, and the Future

Pricing

Value has never been the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition’s strong suit and again we’re dealing with a $1,000 processor. While we’ve criticized AMD in the past for increasing the price of its Athlon 64 FX, there’s certainly nothing compelling AMD to act more aggressively with its pricing schedule as Intel continues charging the same amount for its best effort. Naturally, that puts the Extreme Edition at an immediate disadvantage, before we even jump into the benchmarks.

Intel D925XECV2 925XE Motherboard

Pricing on the 925XE chipset also remains the same to motherboard manufacturers - $50. Intel doesn’t publish MSRP pricing on its motherboards, but representatives at the company claim street pricing should hover in the neighborhood of $180-$190.

Overclocking

As far as we know, this will be the last processor manufactured on the Gallatin core, a derivative of the 130nm Northwood intended primarily for workstations and servers. That’s generally an indication that we’re seeing the limits of a given lithography process, and indeed, Intel’s move to the 31-stage Prescott at 90nm for its desktop products seems to confirm this.

Consequentially, you really shouldn’t expect much out of the 3.46GHz Extreme Edition in the way of overclocking. It’s fairly overextended as it is, and even a meager five percent boost using Intel’s Burn-In mode failed to yield stable operation.

AMD makes it possible to work around that sort of problem by unlocking its clock multipliers. However, we confirmed that the Extreme Edition is locked fast, allowing no increase or decrease of multiplier vales in order to tinker with bus speeds.

The Future

The most positive message we can relay here is that there looks to be hope for the Extreme Edition family in the form of a new micro-architecture and core designation. Rumor has it that later this year, Intel will follow its 3.46GHz with a 3.73GHz Extreme Edition built using the 90nm process and the 31-stage execution pipeline. We’re expecting to see a 2MB L2 cache rather than the L3, the NX-bit in hardware, which AMD refers to as Enhanced Virus Protection, SSE3, and an enhanced version of SpeedStep, similar to Demand-Based Switching (DBS) on the Xeon. With more value-added features and seeimingly augmented performance, this new Extreme Edition could be just what Intel needs to get it back into a once-competitive match-up.