The Pentium D: Intel's Dual Core Silver Bullet Previewed

By Patrick Schmid
published

Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 840

Marketing at its best: The new PEE logo looks nice, but that still won't make the chip much faster than the Pentium D.

Intel's Pentium Extreme Edition 840 will support Hyper Threading and open multipliers above x14, giving users the opportunity to overclock their Extreme Edition at will. All you need is an overclocking-friendly motherboard in order to change speed settings in the BIOS. Here is where Hyper Threading may be disabled, too, which we found to be the wiser choice in many cases (see benchmarks).

We need to point out that the new Extreme Edition won't be the top performer at non-thread-level optimized applications. Here, the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition at 3.73 GHz and FSB1066 will remain Intel's fastest chip due to its higher clock and bus speeds.

2 Cores + HT = 4 Logical CPUs

Two cores with Hyper Threading enabled results in four logical processors.

Patrick Schmid
2 Comments Comment from the forums
  • DaveF1953
    How much can the Extreme Edition be had for now? $40? Sounds like a deal to me. Although, older, hotter, and slower in the long run. Best bet now. No?
    Reply
  • wild9
    I'd just go AMD or Core 2, the former having a much lower power draw and great overclocking potential than what you have here. My relative used to run Intel Extreme Editions like this, and the power draw was immense, he had to use water cooling. In the end he ditched it and got AMD. Not trying to say one is better than the other all the time (ie for media encoding the Intel was great), just some ideas to consider. Cheap dual-core AMD's based on AM2 are hard to beat at the moment.
    Reply