It’s the competition between Intel and AMD that pushes Moore’s law and allows the end-user to buy higher performing CPUs at lower prices. Since the release of AMD’s Athlon CPU, we have seen the performance pendulum swing between the two manufacturers and we constantly hear fanboys from either sides justifying the superiority of their preferred manufacturer.

Lately, the Intel camp has been a little quiet and part of the reason for that is Intel’s recent announcement on hitting the brick wall with their Pentium4 CPU speeds. Thus, Intel is currently focused on optimizing their current Pentium4 line-up by adding more Cache, increasing FSB speeds and introducing dual-core CPUs to keep the competition going until something new comes along. It’s somewhat with that philosophy in mind that Intel released their 3.46GHz EE CPU along with the 925XE chipset motherboard that we’re looking at today.

The 3.46GHz CPU is based on the Gallatin core and is basically a Xeon with a 1066MHz (4 x 266MHz) FSB sold as a Pentium4. This was a bit surprising as the Gallatin is based on the older Northwood core and not the newer 0.90nm Prescott core that is used by all new Pentium4 CPUs. Besides the FSB speed bump, this CPU being an Extreme Edition, features 2MB of L3 cache which is over and above the L1 and L2 caches found is standard Pentium4 CPUs. Like most new CPUs by Intel, the 3.46GHz EE is packaged in an LGA775 format.

On the chipset side, the only modification made by Intel to the 925XE is the official support for 1066MHz FSB which will allow the new 3.46GHz CPU to run in sync with the DDR2-533MHz memory. In our opinion, Intel should not have released the original 925X chipset as that really didn’t offer any improvement over the 915 chipset. Instead, Intel should’ve waited for a couple of months and simply released this 925XE.

All that aside, lets take a look at the performance of this new CPU/chipset combo and see how it stacks up against other offerings by AMD and Intel. We used the nVidia 6800GT card and the Maxtor 80GB 7200RPM/8MB cache hard drive for all the tests. On the Pentium4 front, we used MSI's 915 and Gigabyte's 925X boards for the 3.4GHz CPU as well as Intel's 925XE Desktop board for 3.4GHz and 3.46GHz performance measurement. On the AMD side, the Gigabyte nForce4 SLI board was used to test the 3500+ and 4000+ CPU along with 2 x 512MB Corsair DDR400 modules with 2.0-2-2-5 timing. For Intel, we used OCZ's DDR2-666 modules with 4.0-4-4-12 timings. The lower timings on the DDR2 memory modules certainly put the Pentium4 CPUs at a slight disadvantage but unfortunately we dont have anything better for now.