"Conclusion
Well, if you were expecting to get some significant performance improvements with the launch of the new Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.46GHz and i925XE Express chipset, then you are probably somewhat disappointed. The transition of the Pentium 4 XE CPUs to 1066MHz bus ensures a tiny performance gain, and the clock frequency of the top solution in this family grew up really insignificantly. As a result, everything we have already said about Pentium 4 Extreme Edition CPUs in our previous articles remains valid even after the launch of the new model in the family.
Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.46GHz is a crazily expensive CPU (the price at launch was set to $999) with pretty arguable performance advantages. Even the top model in the Pentium 4 Prescott family working at 3.6GHz - Pentium 4 560 – appears faster in quite a few applications. In fact, Pentium 4 XE boasts noticeable performance benefits in games and in computational tasks of various sorts. However, in all the applications where Pentium 4 XE 3.46GHz does outperform Pentium 4 560, AMD’s Athlon 64 FX-55 solution still turns out faster. This way we will not be able to claim that Intel’s newcomer would be a successful choice for this type of tasks. All in all, this doesn’t make our final verdict sound very promising: Pentium 4 XE 3.46GHz CPU can be of interest to real Intel hardware fans, who are ready to invest $1000 in the right to own a relatively rare and exclusive solution. So far, we do not see any real practical value of the new Pentium 4 XE 3.46Ghz CPU.
As far as the new i925XE Express chipset is concerned, this solution also doesnÂ’t offer us anything really new. It is just a slightly enhanced version of the i925X core logic, which we are already very well familiar with. Therefore the new chipset boasts the same features and provides the same performance level (which is actually even lower than what we are still able to get from the good old i875P based platform). However, i925XE Express has quite a few promising prospects ahead. Mainboards based on it will become popular among overclocking fans (we will check it out first hand when the mass mainboards on the new i925XE Express appear in our lab). Moreover, the performance of i925XE Express based platforms can also improve when DDR2-533 SDRAM featuring more aggressive timings (for example, 3-3-3-8) comes out."
Sounds like they weren't too impressed with it, neither am i. how is 3-3-3-8 "aggressive timings"? And how is a $1000 CPU even worth considering? They even admit the FX-55 is faster and cheaper, and even some of the older P4 3.6GHz were faster in some tests than this new overppriced one. not impressed at all. the P-M was more impressive lol. there "rare" processor sounds more like a "flop" procesor to me.