Conclusions
The Pentium Extreme Edition marks real progress for Intel on multiple fronts. It is the fastest all-around desktop CPU that Intel has ever produced, and thanks to its faster bus, larger cache, and higher clock speeds, the Extreme Edition 955 consistently outruns the older Extreme Edition 840. These features, combined with NVIDIA's multithreaded graphics drivers, even make the Extreme Edition 955 a reasonably solid choice for 3D gaming—faster than the P4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz, believe it or not. At the same time, the Extreme Edition 955 consumes less power at peak than the Extreme Edition 840, proving that Intel's 65nm fabrication process can deliver the tangible benefits that we've come to expect from a die shrink. That's comforting news after our faith was shaken by the Pentium 4's power and heat problems at 90nm. Not only that, but there's apparently quite a bit of clock frequency headroom left in this 3.46GHz processor. Ours ran stable for hours at 4.26GHz with nary a hiccup.

I've never recommended buying a $999 processor and I'm not going to start now, but most of these things are good news for the rest of Intel's desktop processor lineup, as well. We will have to test the new Pentium D 900 series soon to see exactly how it handles. Products in the Pentium D 900 line are available in the wild right now, and the Extreme Edition 955 should be available in the next week or so, according to Intel.

Our test results make it clear, however, that Intel probably won't be able to catch up with AMD using processors based on the Netburst microarchitecture; it will have to wait for its new microarchitecture for that. Despite being produced at 90nm and having a much lower clock speed, the Athlon 64 FX-60 nearly ran the tables in our array of benchmarks, and it did so while consuming less power—both at idle and under load—than the Pentium Extreme Edition 955. The FX-60's performance dominance wasn't always deep, but it was very wide, with the top spot in only a few tests going to an Intel processor.

I had kind of expected our use, this time out, of newly compiled 64-bit binaries, multithreaded applications that can take advantage of Hyper-Threading, exceptionally fast Crucial 800MHz DDR2 memory, and multithreaded graphics drivers to give the Netburst architecture something of a boost in relative performance. Turns out that wasn't the case.

AMD was certainly right to choose this time to transition the FX line to dual-core processors. The FX-60 looked every bit a worthy successor to the FX-57 in our gaming tests, and it creamed the FX-57 in pretty much anything multithreaded. It only makes sense for AMD's image product to be a dual-core design, as Intel's has been for a while now. Fortunately, the FX-60 requires virtually no compromises of gamers, despite its slightly lower clock speed than the FX-57.

One wouldn't expect to have to make any compromises if one were paying $1031 for a microprocessor, which is what AMD intends to charge for the Athlon 64 FX-60. Personally, I'd be content with an overclocked Athlon 64 X2 3800+, but if you want to have the fastest desktop CPU money can buy, the FX-60 is undoubtedly it.