Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955

Low Detail Gaming:

Summary:

The Pentium Extreme Edition 955 seems to fit in where we'd expect it to, considering its clock speed. All current games generally show small performance benefits when using multi-core processors. It doesn't particularly shine out as a gaming orientated CPU in this selection of low-detail gaming tests, because multi-threaded games haven't taken off just yet.

There are several multi-core patches appearing for newer games - we'll revisit dual core performance with the various multi-core patches in the new year. Lets not forget both ATI and NVIDIA have released dual-core optimised drivers too - that's something else that we'll have to come back to in a future article.

Despite the memory performance increases in the i975X chipset, we found that our i955X-based Gigabyte motherboard was faster than the Intel D975XBX desktop board in both Doom 3 and Far Cry. Having said that, the D975XBX desktop board managed to pull out a marginal win in our low detail Unreal Tournament 2004 test.