System setup and notes
Hardware and Software
Test Platforms
| Intel Pentium 840 XE System | Intel Pentium 4 660/640 System | AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 System | |
| Processor(s) | Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840 - 3.2GHz | Intel Pentium 4 660/640 - 3.6GHz/3.2GHz | AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 - 2.4GHz |
| Mainboard | Intel 955X Express (Black Creek) | EPoX 5LWA+ 925XE | ABIT AX8 K8T890 |
| Memory | 1GByte (2x512MB) Micron DDR2-667 @ DDR667 | 1GByte (2x512MB) Crucial Ballistix DDR2-667 @ DDR533 | 1GByte (2x512MB) Corsair XMS3200 | Memory timings | 5-5-5-15 | 4-4-4-12 | 2-2-2-5 1T |
| Graphics Card | ATI RADEON X850 XT PE - PEG16X - CATALYST 5.3 | Disk Drive | 160GB WD IDE |
| BIOS Version | 18/3/2005 Initial Release | 16/3/2005 | BIOS 10 - 25th February 2005 |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, SP2 | ||
| Mainboard Software | Intel INF Update Utility 7.0.0.1014 beta | Intel INF Update Utility 6.3.0.1007 | VIA Hyperion Pro v4.55 |
Benchmark Software
HEXUS in-house Cryptography Benchmark
HEXUS Pifast Benchmark
ScienceMark 2.0 (7th February 2005)
Realstorm 2004
CINEBENCH 2003
MP3 encoding using Intel compiler and LAME 3.97a
PicCOLOR 32-bit v4.0
Kribibench v1.1.9
Microsoft Movie Maker 2.1 media encoding
ABBYY FineReader 7.0 Professional OCR
DOOM 3 Timedemo 1
3DMark05 b1.2.0 CPU test
UT2003 Bot Match
Notes
The dual-core Extreme Edition 840 will be directly compared to a couple of Pentium 4 600-series CPUs in the form of the current range-topping 660, running at 3.6GHz and sporting 2MB of L2 cache, and the 640, a 3.2GHz model that ticks along at the same clock speed as the dual-core model, albeit with only a single core. Further, an AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 is included to provide some reference numbers from an established processor powerhouse. Clock speeds were as follows:
3630.8MHz - Intel Pentium 4 660
3227.3MHz - Intel Pentium 4 640
3199.7MHz - Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840
2416.1MHz - AMD Athlon 64 FX-53
All benchmarks were carried out at 1024x768x32 unless otherwise stated. Benchmarks were conducted three times and the highest and lowest results were discarded. Please also note that the test kit contained a pre-production Intel D955XBK motherboard whose specifications and/or performance may not reflect the full retail model's.
