Intel 3.46EE and 925XE Chipset – 1066 MHz FSB

Conclusions

The Intel 3.46 Exteme Edition processor is a mixed bag from Intel.  The good points on the processor include a new front-side bus speed and a large cache (over the Prescott cores).  While the frequency hasn’t really changed, the increase of the FSB to 266 MHz x 4 (1066 MHz) gives the P4 platform a bit more juice to work with as the memory bus once again becomes synchronous.  Memory experts will tell you that the majority of the time, a synchronous memory bus with tighter memory timings is better than a faster asynchronous memory bus with more lax timings.  We are seeing that here on the 3.46EE processor running at 266/266 with DDR2 timings of 3-3-8 and a CAS latency of 3.0. 

The new DDR2 memory modules we are seeing are all working on getting the timings of the chips down to lower levels as this is the major problem with DDR2 inheritly — longer latency.  Our synthetic benchmarks showed you that a synchronous memory bus coupled with faster timings can make quite a difference.  Just reference our SiSoft Sandra tests and especially our Quake III frame rates.  I doubt we’ll see DDR2-533 ever run at the 2-2-5 CAS 2.0 settings that we are seeing DDR run at on the AMD platform any time soon, but that is all the memory chip and module manufacturers goals.  Of course, the increase to DDR2-667 should also be coming soon, and that will once again bring us to another asynchronous configuration, and the whole cycle continues.  Isn’t hardware technology fun?

The negative points for Intel on this processor launch is that even with the performance increases we saw on the 3.46EE processor, they are still falling behind the AMD Athlon 64 line.  And we are talking about more than just a couple of the benchmarks, and more than just the gaming benchmarks.  And when the Intel processors do fall behind, we have seen them fall behind quite a bit.  More than once we noted that the Athlon 64 3500+ processor platform was out running the Intel 3.46EE processor.  Not good news since the 3.46EE is going to cost you $999 while the Athlon 64 3500+ can be found for about $290 shipped.  This will become more apparent when we look at our price vs performance comparisons below.

This leads us to ask ‘what can Intel do to catch up’?  Everyone knows that Intel publically shelved the idea of a 4 GHz Pentium 4 processor meaning that the life of the P4 core is coming to an end.  Prescott turned out to be too hot, too power hungry and just too demanding to continue ramping up the frequencies.  A good editorial recently on The Inquirer mentions that they think Intel is going to have a hard road ahead of them for at least the next two years as the company restructures for another goal than the 10 GHz P4.  The good news for Intel is that AMD, though not in as bad a position as Intel, is also planning a slow down of new processor releases, giving Intel more time than they might have usually had to fix the problem.

AMD and Intel will both have dual core offerings out next year, my guess is sometime after June, but until then I would expect to see very few new flagship CPUs coming from either designer.  It looks like Intel is going to settle for their current position in the enthusiast community with the Extreme Edition and Prescott lines. 

Price vs Performance Data

As we have done on previous processor releases, we like to take the time to create these “price/performance” ratio tables that make an attempt to place a simple ranking system on the performance of a processor.  Keep in mind that this is simply an ATTEMPT to do this and it is by no means a fool proof or complete representation of a processors performance or value.  I simply take the benchmark results that I presented here in our review, and divide them by the pricing that we have for each processor.  This gives us a normalized comparable value to look at and the bolded ratio is the “winner” or best score of the bunch (ie: the highest).

On the prices of the EE processors, notice we have kept the 3.4EE as $999 as well as the 3.46EE as we don’t really expect the prices to drop on the 3.4EE because of the 3.46EE’s release.

This is our quick look at a few of the gaming results we got in our benchmarks.  The addition of the 3.46EE processor definitely didn’t change any of the final outcomes on the price against performance ratios as the 3.46EE is about as low as it gets.  It comes in second to last on all the gaming tests simply because the pricing on the 3.4EE processor remained the same at $999 as well.  The AMD FX-55 processor is no saint by this scale either, as it isn’t far from where the EE processors are at as well. 

On the other side of things we look at content creation and non-gaming system performance.  Again the Intel 3.46EE isn’t contending as the best deal in the market, but neither Intel of AMD ever markets their flagship processors on that idea anyway.  The value-conscience need not apply here.

Conclusion

Intel’s 3.46 Extreme Edition processor based on the new 1066 MHz FSB is a solid step in the right direction for Intel’s processor line; it just looks like they don’t have many steps in this direction left.  You can count on Intel moving the features of the EE processors down to the 5xx series sometime soon, adding cache and increasing the bus speed, making the reasoning behind the EE line fall apart, much like we have seen the AMD FX line seem to crumble to merely a marketing need and not a technical one.  Since we all know that 4 GHz isn’t going to happen for the P4, Intel will start tweaking the core with the caches and optimizations to keep performance increasing until their next big core change — dual cores and a more “Pentium M style” of processor.  After all, MHz isn’t all that matters. 

Unless you have very specific high-performance needs that a HyperThreaded processor with a large L3 cache is perfect for, it’s hard to recommend the new 3.46EE processor to any enthusiasts or gamers.  Look elsewhere for a lower cost system with similar performance, Intel or AMD, and have fun tweaking and overclocking. 

Feel free to use our PriceGrabber service to find great deals on the EE processors!