Working with Intel is a lot easier than working with AMD in the Middle Eastern region. It usually takes just one phone call and a couple of days to get Intel’s latest greatest in our labs while AMD…lets just say that the only FX-55 CPU allocated for the entire region are still making rounds of places that we have no idea of. But that’s a different story for another day. Today, we have Intel’s $999 CPU with us- the Pentium4 3.73GHz Extreme Edition.

When Intel released their first EE CPU, we saw a very clear distinction between itself and other standard Pentium4 CPUs- the amount of on-die cache. At that time, the Pentium4 processor had 512k L2 cache while the EE came equipped with a 512k L2 cache as well as a hefty 2MB L3 cache. However, between that time and today, the Pentium4 CPU got upgraded to a 1MB cache and now a 2MB L2 cache while the 3.73GHz' L3 cache got replaced by an L2 cache of the same size due to its move to the Prescott core. So the only thing different about the new EE CPU is its ability to operate at 1066MHz FSB compared to the 800MHz FSB of the regular Pentium4 660 series CPU.

This new Prescott core based EE, along with Intel’s 66x based Pentium4 lineup also bring about some new features to the P4 family and the one that will probably make the most noise is 64-bit support in the form of EMT64. While AMD has been providing 64-bit support in their CPUs ever since the Opteron was released, we have yet to see the release of Microsoft’s 64 bit Operating System and now that Intel has joined the 64-bit party, we’re sure that the OS will hit RTM very soon.

Lets get started with the performance of this CPU which we compare to Pentium4 3.4GHz and 3.46GHz EE CPUs as well as Athlon64 3500+ and 4000+ CPUs from AMD. From our standard testbench, 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 Intel's 925XE Desktop board while on the AMD side, the Gigabyte nForce4 SLI board was used along with 2 x 512MB Corsair DDR400 modules with 2.0-2-2-5 timing. For the Intel setup, 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.