Conclusion: Expect Some Excitement This Fall
The performance scores that you see here are already very promising - even if the CPUs for FSB1066 (P4 Extreme Edition 3.46 GHz or P4 720) are not yet available. The ATI Radeon X600 that we used does not do justice to the 775 platform, because in the benchmarks, the graphics card is clearly the bottleneck. With a GeForce 6800 GT however, high overclocking results could not be achieved, and we weren't able to obtain an X800 at such short notice.
What has become clear is that the Pentium 4 really comes into its own on the new socket only in combination with both FSB1066 and DDR2-667. Through the high bandwidth, Intel could offer some stiff competition on terrain that has become increasingly dominated by a strong Athlon 64.
Intel will, with certainty, enter the 64-bit arena with its Pentium 4 720 in the late fall of this year. The resulting high-end systems can be viewed as investments well worth their money, due to EM64T, XD-bit, 2 MB L2 Cache, Thermal Monitoring 2, DDR 667 memory and the interesting features of the 925XE platform. The same thing cannot be said of the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. Compared to the P4 560, the EE costs 50% more and offers hardly any additional performance worth mentioning.
In Q2 of next year, the next generation of chipsets will follow: Glenwood as the successor to the 925 chipset and Lakeport as a replacement for the 915. At the moment, though, one can only speculate on the details.
