Date: February 16th, 2004.
Article by: Nathan Glentworth
(Owner, Head Editor & Hardware Reviewer)
Product was donated by: Intel
<--Shop for the P4 3.2Ghz Extreme Edition Processor Here
PRODUCT PICTORIAL
With a price varying from US$875 for an OEM P4EE (which I am reviewing
today) to just over the US$1000 mark for the retail boxed version, the
3.2Ghz Extreme Edition is not targeted towards the budget conscious,
but towards the professional, enthusiast and/or gamer needing a blistering
fast CPU right out of the box. I know some people may bawk at this and
say they can get a 2.4C to overclock and run just as fast, but as you
will see later in the benchmarking, the 3.2EE has an advantage.
The 3.2Ghz Extreme Edition in all its speedy glory.
When comparing to the 2.4C, you can very well see, the
Extreme Edition looks just like any P4C northwood on the market today.
Only when you flip them over do you notice the difference.
Which one do you think is the Extreme? If you guessed the one with all
the on-die memory at the top, you are right.
OVERCLOCKING
*Disclaimer - Intel does not accept, condone or encourage
the overclocking of any of their processors. Doing so will void your
warranty completely and cause potential system malfunction, damage and
data loss. Overclock at your own risk. Tweaknews.net and any
related parties will not be responsible for any financial, physical
or information loss if a problem occurs.*
*Cough* Now that is out of the way, I was not looking
forward to overclocking the 3.2EE because of my experience overclocking
the 3.0C standard (3.0C review HERE).
With that said, I was only expecting to get to maybe just under 3.5Ghz
on air cooling. Was I wrong, pleasantly, yes I was. Using a 1:1 memory
divider and some ultra fast Corsair PC4400 ram (Review HERE),
I was able to push the 3.2Ghz up an additional 500Mhz to a rock stable
3.7Ghz. When I mean rock stable, that meant not one error through 12
hours or Prime95 torture testing and the ability to run all benchmarks
without one problem. If even a single glitch, hang or bug was recorded,
the overclock was lowered until the problem went away. I do not deem
an overclock as what the system will post or boot into windows with,
but what will handle everything you can throw at it without failure.
Overall, the overclock was rather impressive and does
give you a significant performance boost across your whole system. But
that is what the benchmarks will layout for you.
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