To get an idea of how good the PEE is at multi-tasking we started by playing Doom 3 on High Quality settings. As we expected, the ATI Radeon X850 handled it flawlessly. We quit the game and started a full system scan running in Norton AV which bumped CPU usage up to 75 per cent or so and then went back into Doom 3. Although it took a while longer to start up, gameplay was completely smooth and Norton's presence was completely undetectable. Once again, we quit Doom 3 and with Norton still running we set iTunes to transcode two albums' worth of MP3 files to AAC format. We opened Doom 3 up again, leaving Norton and iTunes running in the background, and the gameplay continued to be superb. It provided us with a computing experience that we have never had before. Very, very impressive, so just remember, the benchmarks don't give the full story.

Verdict

Would we buy a brand new PEE-based machine? Probably not, but that's the answer we give with most new technology. We said it about Serial ATA, PCI Express, DDR memory and DDR2 memory, and now we're saying it about dual-core processors - ultimately, the price premium for the Extreme Edition will be too high.

That said, dual- and multi-core processors are definitely the way forward. Unlike Hyper-Threading, using a dual-core processor really is like adding a second CPU to your machine, rather than faking it up, as HT does. You really do have double the processor resources, all the time, not just when there happen to be some execution units going spare.

As is always the case, early adopters are going to pay a high price for small gains, but as Intel rolls out dual-core chips across all its platforms, software developers will be forced to code applications with multi-threading support. In the meantime though, anyone who's doing a significant amount of multi-tasking should see a significant performance boost right now.

How We Tested

After we had run SYSmark 2002 we used Windows Media Encoder 9 to encode a 416MB AVI movie file in WMV 9 format which finishes up 4MB in size. Next we used iTunes 4.7.1 to transcode a 22MB MP3 (128Kbps) audio file to AAC format at 128Kbps. Finally, we opened a 47.2MB TIFF in Adobe Photoshop CS 8 and resized it and increased the resolution so it grew to 658MB in size.

Pentium Extreme Edition 840 3.2GHz with HT enabled, 800MHz FSB on Intel 955XBK with 1GB 667MHz DDR 2

SYSmark 2002 Overall 361, Internet 515, Office 253
3DMark05 1.2 5729
Encoding Kitesurfing AVI to WMV 9 CPU load 70% 1m 25s
iTunes MP3 to AAC conversion 41s
Photoshop conversion 32s plus 47s to write the TIFF

Pentium D 3.2GHz (Pentium Extreme Edition 840 with HT disabled), 800MHz FSB on Intel 955XBK with 1GB 667MHz DDR 2

SYSmark 2002 Overall 369, Internet 530, Office 257
3DMark05 1.2 5721
Encoding Kitesurfing AVI to WMV 9 CPU load 80% 1m 44s
iTunes MP3 to AAC conversion 41s
Photoshop conversion 32s plus 47s to write the TIFF

Dual Xeon 3.2GHz/533MHz FSB/2MB L3 cache on Asus PCH-DL with 875P chipset and 1GB PC3200 memory

SYSmark 2002 Overall 319, Internet 436, Office 232
Encoding Kitesurfing AVI to WMV 9 CPU load 70% 1m 24s
iTunes MP3 to AAC conversion 37s
Photoshop conversion 30s plus 43s to write the TIFF

Pentium 4EE 3.4GHz 760 on D925XCV with 1GB 533MHz DDR2

SYSmark 2002 Overall 387, Internet 499, Office 300
Encoding Kitesurfing AVI to WMV 9 CPU load 90% 2m 11s
iTunes MP3 to AAC conversion 37s
Photoshop conversion 28s plus 39s to write the TIFF

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