Date:
Sunday , October 31, 2004
Author:
Kyle Bennett
Editor:
Sean Quinn
Google +1

Intel's 3.46EE with 1066 FSB and 925XE

Intel's first Pentium 4 with a 1066MHz front side bus makes its debut at 3.46GHz with the supporting chipset, the Intel 925XE. Will a big kick in the bus turn our Pentium 4 back into the gaming leader it used to be?

continued...

Test Setups

MSI K8T NEO2 (VIA K8T800Pro) - AthlonFX-55, Athlon64 4000+, 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMSDDR3200XLPro DDR400 (2,2,2,5), NVIDIA NV40 (400/550) (v61.45 driver), 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptors RAID 0, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

Intel 925XECV2 (Intel 925XE) - Pentium 4 3.466GHz Extreme Edition, Pentium 4 3.4 Extreme Edition, and Pentium 4 3.6GHz Prescott, 1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMS2DDR533 DDR533 (3,3,3,12), NVIDIA NV45 (400/550) (v61.45 driver), 2 x 36GB Western Digital Raptors RAID 0, Windows XP w/SP1 and DX9B.

SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth Benchmark

Article Image

As you can see, our 3.46EE with an accelerated bus speed does have a little gain in this synthetic benchmark, but do keep in mind that we are measuring a memory bus that has not progressed any with this 925XE chipset launch. We are still dealing with high-latency DDR2 memory modules at 533MHz the same as with the 925X. Certainly low latency DDR at 400MHz still shines brightly on our AMD platforms. This is one reason, albeit not the only one, you have not seen AMD be in a rush to move away from DDR.

With this release, we were really hoping for Intel to up the ante on the memory bus speed as well; at least to 666MHz DDR2 to fill in that gap a bit. That however did not happen.

As mentioned on our introduction page, we could easily run our Corsair DDR2-533 at 710MHz on our Intel test motherboard that was supplied to us by Intel with the 3.46EE CPU. With that we got memory bandwidth scores in the 5.5GB/s range. This certainly makes us look forward to memory bus increases in the future.