Intel's Pentium Extreme Edition 965: The Last of a Dying Breed

Looking Ahead, the Conroe Comparison

Intel was well aware of what it was doing when it showed off Conroe at IDF, and it knew that there's no way that we could recommend the Pentium Extreme Edition 965 when Conroe was a little over a quarter away. If you need more of a reminder of why it will only help to wait, here are a few of the Conroe tests that we were able to run at IDF, which we duplicated on our systems here (same test configuration, test files and hardware):

Let's also not forget that the Conroe E6700 will list for $530, and there will eventually be an Extreme Edition based on it as well that will offer even better performance than what we're seeing here. In other words, as difficult as it usually is to recommend any of the FX or Extreme Edition series, it's virtually impossible to do so when you think of what's coming.

But if you absolutely must spend $1000+ on a CPU today, what should you do? While the 965 has become a lot more competitive with the FX-60, our overall nod still goes to AMD. The 965 does have its strengths in 3dsmax and video encoding, so if those are areas in which you are partcularly looking for stellar performance, then the recommendation obviously swings to Intel.

With AMD's Socket-AM2 right around the corner, and Conroe not too far away, we honestly can't recommend anything but a low cost CPU today to avoid virtually immediate obsolescence. And we'll be telling you exactly what low cost CPU that would be sometime next week...