We were given a pleasant surprise by Intel at IDF just a few weeks ago: a fully functional and benchmark-able system based on Intel's next-generation desktop processor, codenamed Conroe. The performance that we saw was stunning and the power efficiency promised is a welcome change from the Pentium 4's NetBurst micro-architecture. But after leaving sunny California and returning to reality, we found another Intel chip in our labs; it just wasn't Conroe.

With the heatspreader on top of the chip, you could hardly tell it apart from a Conroe. It looked and smelled like one, but that's where the similarities end. While the fastest Conroe based processors will barely exceed 3.0GHz, this chip is clocked at a mighty 3.73GHz. Indeed, what Intel had sent us was no Conroe. It was the new dual core Pentium Extreme Edition 965, a chip that's being announced today, but one that won't actually be shipping in retail systems until next month. And yes, it's another very high clocked, deeply pipelined CPU from Intel. It's not the power efficient, high performing, competitive part that we want from Intel; it's yet another bump in the rocky road of NetBurst.

Needless to say, it's not a chip that we were too excited about, especially after having our appetites whet by Conroe earlier this month. But the new Extreme Edition did manage to surprise us in a number of areas, some of which may surprise you as well. When we last looked at the Pentium Extreme Edition 955, we found its power consumption to be a bit troubling. The move to 65nm didn't seem to do much for the Pentium 4, as AMD was still able to maintain a significant advantage in power consumption. As it turns out, the initial 65nm parts from Intel did not support all of the power management features that were introduced in later versions of Intel's 90nm silicon. Mainly, support for EIST (Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology) and the new C1E enhanced halt state, both of which were introduced over a year ago initially with C1E on the 5xxJ series of processors and later adding EIST on the 6xx series of processors. For whatever reason, neither technology made its way into the Presler EE chips (65nm dual core Extreme Edition). With the new Extreme Edition 965, Intel re-added support for C1E, but EIST is still not supported (note that C1E support was added to later steppings of the EE 955, just not the initial stepping). The two technologies vary as follows (taken from our Pentium 4 6xx review):

C1E - Enhanced Halt State

"Whenever the OS executes the halt instruction, the CPU enters what is known as the halt state.  Architecturally, what's going on in a halt state is the clock signal is shut off to the CPU for some period of time. With no clock signal, none of the logic in the chip will do anything and thus power consumption is reduced.  Performance is also significantly reduced; however, the halt instruction isn't usually called during application usage, so the performance aspects of the halt state aren't very important.

The problem with the halt state is that it does nothing to reduce voltage, only current draw by stopping clocks from going to the CPU.  Since Power varies linearly with both current and voltage (P = I * V), you're effectively only addressing half of the problem. The Enhanced Halt State, as Intel calls it, does two things: it reduces the clock speed of the CPU by decreasing the clock multiplier down to its minimum value (on the EE 965 series, that's 14x, or 2.8GHz), then reducing the voltage.  The clock speed is reduced and then the voltage is dropped, to maintain stability. 

Intel insists that the enhanced halt state is a significantly lower power state than the conventional halt state, thanks to the reduction in voltage in addition to the reduction in clock speed.  While the standard halt state causes a linear reduction in power, Intel's enhanced halt state causes an exponential decrease in power, potentially offering better power savings than the standard halt state.  The real world impact obviously depends on how idle your system happens to be."

EIST:

"What EIST does is very similar to AMD's Cool'n'Quiet. It is demand based reduction in CPU clock speed and voltage.  Using the same mechanism of adjusting clock speed and voltage, based on the application demand, the processor will dynamically increase/decrease its clock speed between its minimum clock and its normal operating frequency, as well as voltage, in order to optimize for power consumption. 

Because of the way EIST (and AMD's Cool'n'Quiet) works, there's inherently a drop in performance.  The idea is this: if you're performing a task that's not using 100% of the CPU, the CPU will operate at a slightly reduced frequency in order to conserve power.  So, while some tasks will require that the system run at full speed, others will run at lower speeds. "

Because of the support for C1E and Intel's 65nm process, power consumption is finally competitive with AMD. Let's have a look at idle power consumption first:

Note that AMD is penalized a bit here because we're testing on an ASUS A8N32-SLI, which effectively features two North Bridges (one masquerading as a South Bridge) to offer two dedicated x16 slots. The two chips together consume more power than NVIDIA's 2 x8 single chip design, so depending on what chipset that you use, AMD's power consumption could be a bit lower.

Also, keep in mind that AMD's Cool'n'Quiet is enabled, and the EE 965's C1E support is kicking in to keep its power consumption low at idle as well.

Under load, the comparison is also very close:

With power consumption finally very close between AMD and Intel, who is the true winner here? From AMD's perspective, the FX-60 is a 90nm chip that still consumes less power than Intel's 65nm CPU, and its power consumption will only go down further when AMD ramps up its 65nm process. From Intel's perspective, AMD won't be producing 65nm in volume until 2007, the same year when Intel will start playing with 45nm chips. Not to mention that the EE 965 is made up of 376 million transistors compared to AMD's 233 million, running on a much more power-hungry architecture. So to Intel, being able to almost equal AMD's power consumption on a NetBurst based part is pretty impressive. From our perspective, it's nice that the EE 965 brings power consumption down to a more reasonable level, but what really matters is how well it performs at that relatively similar power envelope. And that's what we'll find out next.

In our first look at Intel's Presler core with the Extreme Edition 955, we investigated the benefits of Hyper Threading with a dual core CPU as well as the performance impact of Presler over Smithfield. So, be sure to consult that article if you want a more in-depth look at Intel's 65nm dual core desktop CPU.



The Test

We've started upgrading bits and pieces of our CPU test bed, so the numbers in this review are not comparable to those in previous reviews. Our previous 120GB 7200.7 Seagate PATA hard drive has been replaced with a 300GB 7200.9 Seagate SATA drive. And we're using a single Radeon X1900 XTX in our testbeds as well.

While the Intel motherboard that we've been using remains the same (albeit with a BIOS update to recognize the EE 965 processor), we've switched to the ASUS A8N32-SLI based on the nForce4 SLI x16 chipset for the AMD processors.

CPU:	AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 (2.6GHz/1MBx2) Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965 (3.73GHz/2MBx2) Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955 (3.46GHz/2MBx2)
Motherboard:	ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe Intel BadAxe 975X
Chipset:	NVIDIA nForce4 SLI x16 Intel 975X
Chipset Drivers:	nForce4 x16 6.85 Intel 7.2.2.1006
Hard Disk:	Seagate 7200.9 300GB SATA
Memory:	OCZ PC3500 DDR 2-2-2-7 DDR2-667 4-4-4-15
Video Card:	ATI Radeon X1900 XTX
Video Drivers:	ATI Catalyst 6.3
Desktop Resolution:	1280 x 1024 - 32-bit @ 60Hz
OS:	Windows XP Professional SP2

Overall Performance using Winstone 2004

Business Winstone 2004

Business Winstone 2004 tests the following applications in various usage scenarios:

. Microsoft Access 2002
. Microsoft Excel 2002
. Microsoft FrontPage 2002
. Microsoft Outlook 2002
. Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
. Microsoft Project 2002
. Microsoft Word 2002
. Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003
. WinZip 8.1

Despite the increase in clock speed, and not very surprisingly, the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 isn't able to catch up to the Athlon 64 FX-60.


Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004

Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 tests the following applications in various usage scenarios:

. Adobe® Photoshop® 7.0.1
. Adobe® Premiere® 6.50
. Macromedia® Director MX 9.0
. Macromedia® Dreamweaver MX 6.1
. Microsoft® Windows MediaTM Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980
. NewTek's LightWave® 3D 7.5b
. SteinbergTM WaveLabTM 4.0f

All chips were tested with Lightwave set to spawn 4 threads.

The story is no different with Multimedia Content Creation Winstone, although the performance disadvantage isn't nearly as large.



Overall Performance using SYSMark 2004

Office Productivity SYSMark 2004

SYSMark's Office Productivity suite consists of three tests, the first of which is the Communication test. The Communication test consists of the following:

"The user receives an email in Outlook 2002 that contains a collection of documents in a zip file. The user reviews his email and updates his calendar while VirusScan 7.0 scans the system. The corporate web site is viewed in Internet Explorer 6.0. Finally, Internet Explorer is used to look at samples of the web pages and documents created during the scenario."

The next test is Document Creation performance:

"The user edits the document using Word 2002. He transcribes an audio file into a document using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 6. Once the document has all the necessary pieces in place, the user changes it into a portable format for easy and secure distribution using Acrobat 5.0.5. The user creates a marketing presentation in PowerPoint 2002 and adds elements to a slide show template."

The final test in our Office Productivity suite is Data Analysis, which BAPCo describes as:

"The user opens a database using Access 2002 and runs some queries. A collection of documents are archived using WinZip 8.1. The queries' results are imported into a spreadsheet using Excel 2002 and are used to generate graphical charts."

The race is extremely close once we look at Office Productivity SYSMark 2004, with the EE 965 and FX-60 offering virtually identical performance.


ICC SYSMark 2004

The first category that we will deal with is 3D Content Creation. The tests that make up this benchmark are described below:

"The user renders a 3D model to a bitmap using 3ds max 5.1, while preparing web pages in Dreamweaver MX. Then the user renders a 3D animation in a vector graphics format."

Next, we have 2D Content Creation performance:

"The user uses Premiere 6.5 to create a movie from several raw input movie cuts and sound cuts and starts exporting it. While waiting on this operation, the user imports the rendered image into Photoshop 7.01, modifies it and saves the results. Once the movie is assembled, the user edits it and creates special effects using After Effects 5.5."

The Internet Content Creation suite is rounded up with a Web Publishing performance test:

"The user extracts content from an archive using WinZip 8.1. Meanwhile, he uses Flash MX to open the exported 3D vector graphics file. He modifies it by including other pictures and optimizes it for faster animation. The final movie with the special effects is then compressed using Windows Media Encoder 9 series in a format that can be broadcast over broadband Internet. The web site is given the final touches in Dreamweaver MX and the system is scanned by VirusScan 7.0."

Under ICC SYSMark 2004, the FX-60 manages to hold on to an 11% lead.

Overall Performance using WorldBench 5

Our final set of overall system performance tests come from WorldBench 5, which is a pretty good tool for looking at older application performance as well as single-threaded performance. 

WorldBench echoes what we've seen from Winstone and SYSMark. The Pentium EE 965 makes a good effort, but still falls short of the Athlon 64 FX-60.



3D Rendering Performance using 3dsmax 7

Once again, we're using an updated version of the SPECapc 3dsmax test for version 7 of the application.  The scenes being rendered haven't actually changed, but the reference numbers used to compute the composite scores have, so these scores aren't directly comparable to results from earlier SPECapc tests.

The Pentium EE has done very well in 3dsmax in the past, and the new 965 is no different as it manages to inch by the FX-60. Unfortunately, the performance advantage is less than 4%, making the FX-60 still the more attractive buy, given its performance in other areas.



Media Encoding Performance using DVD Shrink, WME9, Quicktime and iTunes

First up is DVD Shrink 3.2.0.15. Our test was simple - we took a copy of Star Wars Episode VI and ripped the full DVD to the hard drive without compression, effectively giving us an exact copy of the disc on the hard drive.  Then, using the copy of the DVD on the hard drive (to eliminate any DVD drive bottlenecks), we performed a DVD shrink operation to shrink the movie to fit on a single 4.5GB DVD disc.  All of the options were left on their defaults, so the test ends up being pretty easy to run and reproduce.  The scores reported are DVD encoding times in minutes, with lower numbers meaning better performance. 

The DVD Shrink test is quite important as DVD Shrink is quite possibly one of the easiest tools to rip a DVD.  The easier a tool is to use, the more likely that it's going to be used, and arguably the more important performance using it happens to be. 

The FX-60 couldn't keep up with the old EE 955; the new 965 simply extends Intel's lead even further.

Moving on, we have our Windows Media Encoder 9 test, which uses the advanced profile settings for video encoding.  We left all settings at their defaults and just proceeded with a MPEG-2 to WMV-HD conversion.  The values reported are in frames per second, with higher numbers being better.

The 965 continues to dominate in Windows Media Encoder 9, making the Extreme Edition the choice for anyone who does a lot of video encoding.

Next up, we have Quicktime Pro 7.0.3 and we perform a MPEG-2 to H.264 encoding task.  We've changed our test a bit to make it more streamlined. The export settings are left on their Export to Quicktime Movie defaults (which happens to be a H.264 export). We simply changed the audio encoder to use Apple's AAC codec instead. We report the transcoding time in minutes, with lower values being better. 

As we've seen in the past, Apple's Quicktime 7 Pro for Windows doesn't appear to be very well suited for Intel's architecture. Our sources tell us that this will change over time, but it may end up being too little, too late because by then, the Pentium 4 will be long gone and forgotten. The EE 965 does a better job of keeping up than its predecessor, but the FX-60 still takes the crown in this test.

Finally, we have a MP3 encoding test using iTunes 6.0.1.3.  For this test, we simply took a 304MB wav file and converted it to a 192kbps MP3 file, measuring the encode time in seconds.  The only iTunes option that we changed was to prevent the playback of the song while encoding. 

And with MP3 encoding, the FX-60 continues to hang onto its lead.



Gaming Performance using Battlefield 2, Call of Duty 2 and Quake 4

The new Extreme Edition chip is more competitive in gaming than any of Intel's previous CPUs, but AMD still holds onto the performance lead here - even if only by a thread in some cases.

In both Quake 4 and Call of Duty 2, SMP was enabled, of which all three CPUs compared here could take advantage.

Gaming Performance using F.E.A.R.

Looking Ahead, the Conroe Comparison

Intel was well aware of what it was doing when it showed off Conroe at IDF, and it knew that there's no way that we could recommend the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 when Conroe was a little over a quarter away. If you need more of a reminder of why it will only help to wait, here are a few of the Conroe tests that we were able to run at IDF, which we duplicated on our systems here (same test configuration, test files and hardware):

Let's also not forget that the Conroe E6700 will list for $530, and there will eventually be an Extreme Edition based on it as well that will offer even better performance than what we're seeing here. In other words, as difficult as it usually is to recommend any of the FX or Extreme Edition series, it's virtually impossible to do so when you think of what's coming.

But if you absolutely must spend $1000+ on a CPU today, what should you do? While the 965 has become a lot more competitive with the FX-60, our overall nod still goes to AMD. The 965 does have its strengths in 3dsmax and video encoding, so if those are areas in which you are partcularly looking for stellar performance, then the recommendation obviously swings to Intel.

With AMD's Socket-AM2 right around the corner, and Conroe not too far away, we honestly can't recommend anything but a low cost CPU today to avoid virtually immediate obsolescence. And we'll be telling you exactly what low cost CPU that would be sometime next week...