Looking ahead to Intel's 925XE chipset and FSB1066

Test System

Up to now, the motherboard manufacturers weren’t able to provide a 4:5 clock ratio between FSB and DDR2 memory. Because the 925X is practically unchanged and offered as the 925XE, it could only be a matter of changing a few things to make it run at FSB1066. This option was not available to us however, so we also had to restrict ourselves to 3:4 in order to operate the system memory with 355.5 MHz or DDR2 711

On the one hand, this drives the benchmark results somewhat over the top, since some of the benchmarks react sensitively to larger memory bandwidths. On the other hand, the Prescott will not be available in an FSB1066 version with a 3.73 GHz clock - here, Intel gives priority to the Pentium 4 720 with a 2 MB L2 cache, which would run faster than our Pentium 4 560 anyway. The results should, in any case, suffice to give you a peek at future performance.