Testing setup and notes
Hardware and Software
Test Platforms
| System | Intel Pentium System | AMD Athlon 64 System |
| Processor(s) | Pentium 4 670 (Prescott 2M) Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz Pentium Extreme Edition 840 (Smithfield) Pentium Extreme Edition 965 (Presler) Pentium Extreme Edition 965 (Presler) |
Athlon 64 FX-57 (San Diego) Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (Toledo) Athlon 64 FX-60 (Toledo) |
| Mainboards | Intel D975XBK i975X | ABIT Fatal1ty AN8 nForce4 Ultra DFI LanPartyUT nF4 SLI-D for FX-60 |
| Memory | 2 x 512MB Corsair XMS2-5400UL | 2 x 512MB Corsair Xpert XL DDR-400 |
| Timings | 3-2-2-8 @ 533MHz | 2-2-2-5 @ 400MHz |
| BIOS Version | BX97510J.86A.0354.IB (08/12/2005) | BIOS -19 for ABIT Fat. AN8 - (19/11/2005) - FX60TEST for DFI |
| Disk Drive | 160GB Western Digital PATA | |
| Graphics Card | ATI RADEON X1800 XL 256MB PCIe, CATALYST 5.13 set | |
| Operating System | Windows XP Professional, SP2 32-bit | |
| Mainboard Software | Intel INF Update Utility 7.2.2.1006 | NVIDIA nForce4 Platform Driver 6.70 |
Benchmark Software
ScienceMark 2.0 (21st March 2005)HEXUS.in-house Cryptography Benchmark
Realstorm Raytracing 2004
CINEBENCH 2003
HEXUS.in-house MP3 Encoding Benchmark using LAME 3.97a (Intel Multi-Threaded compiler) - 701MB WAV
DivX 6.1 encoding test. 1700kbps, Insane Quality, 416MB DV file
picCOLOR 32-bit b568
KribiBench v1.1
3DMark2005 b1.2.0
DOOM 3 v1282 - Medium Quality
Far Cry v1.33 - High Quality
Notes
A tasty selection of CPUs against which to judge the Extreme Edition 965's performance. Remember that it's just a 955 with an extra 266MHz clock speed. It will be interesting to see how much better the 965 does against the 3.73GHz Extreme Edition (single-core Prescott) in our multi-threaded benchmarks.For full disclosures' sake, the AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 was run on a DFI LanPartyUT nF4 SLI-D motherboard while the rest if the Athlon 64 CPUs were run on an ABIT AN8 Fatal1ty. Both boards were set up with identical memory timings and both are from the same root nForce4 family.
Overclocking
We managed to run our sample at 4.27GHz (16x266MHz) with a touch over default voltage. That matches the overall clock speed achieved by the Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955 sample we tested three months ago, suggesting that Intel is rebadging '955 wafers as '965 chips now.Let's start the reckoning with a look at memory bandwidth and latency analysis.
