Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 955

Muti-Tasking Performance:

please check the notes at the bottom of the page

Summary:

In our first Multi-Tasking test, we noticed that the virus scanning was less efficient when running Far Cry in the foreground on all of the single cored Athlon 64's. It continued to run in the background, but we noticed the odd hitch in game play despite running a time demo. We did not suffer this problem on the HyperThreaded Pentium 4's, which were pretty smooth throughout the entire time demo loop. Meanwhile, the Pentium Extreme Edition 955, Pentium D 820 and Athlon 64 X2 4800+ were creamy smooth, as they say.

In our second Multi-Tasking test, the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 was not too far behind the Athlon 64 X2 4800+. The single cored Athlon 64 processors ground to a halt and we found it very hard to control DVD Shrink - we ended up having to end the process, rather than close the program in the normal fashion. We also experienced hitching inside Far Cry, more so than when the virus scanner was running in the background. In short, don't try and play games while encoding a DVD on a single cored Athlon 64 processor, you will not have a pleasurable gaming experience, no matter how fast your single cored CPU is.

The third multi-tasking test followed a similar suit to our second test. We experienced extreme lag during video playback, and generally the CPU did not want to handle more than one process at a time. We increased the process priority of both DVD Shrink and Windows Media Player 10 in order to complete the test, and even then, we still experienced very poor playback of our video recording. All of the Intel processors and the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ did not suffer from these problems and were able to handle all three tasks at once. The Pentium Extreme Edition 955 was in a completely different league to all other processors, with virtually no slowdown in encode time when compared to just running DVD Shrink on its own! Amazing.

The final multi-tasking test was the only test where we did not experience any kind of lag or hitching on the single cored Athlon 64 processors. However, the MP3 encoding time increased considerably with the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ nearly 1 1/2 times as fast as it's similarly clocked, single cored cousin. The Pentium 4 670 showed up well and the additional CPU speed really helped in this task. The Pentium Extreme Edition 955 was slower than the higher clocked Pentium 4's, but was in a different league to the single core Athlon 64 processors.