Intel Pentium 4 6XX Sequence & 3.73GHz Extreme Edition Reviews

[Benchmarked against AMD Athlon 64 4000+ & FX-55, Gigabyte K8NXP-SLI nForce4 SLI Motherboard] Looking back at our test scores gives us a sense that this iteration of the Pentium 4 Prescott processor core is significantly more balanced than prior versions. The new Pentium 4 6XX Sequence and Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.37GHz CPUs offered a bit more performance in gaming scenarios but not enough to catch AMD’s fastest Athlon 64 chips at what they do best. And again, when it comes to media encoding or conversion, 3D rendering and modeling, and many newer standard business applications, the Pentium 4 extends it lead today with these new additions to the Intel lineup. Especially in common multitasking workloads and usage models, with an OS that supports Hyper-Threading, the Pentium 4 obviously is at its best.

Intel Pentium 4 6XX Sequence and 3.73GHz Extreme Edition Processors
HotHardware

[Benchmarked against EPoX 9NPA Ultra (S939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra)] The performance of the top Intel CPUs is still somewhat lower than that of the top Athlon 64 solutions. Although Pentium 4 processors retain leadership in their traditionally strong fields such as video data encoding or final rendering, they still yield to AMD CPUs in most applications including contemporary games.

Intel Pentium 4 6XX Sequence and 3.73GHz Extreme Edition Processors
X-bit labs

I should probably say a word or two about the P4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz. At its customary price of $999, the Extreme Edition was never a bargain hunter’s dream chip. This new 3.73GHz version performs comparably to the previous 3.46GHz one, but no better. The move to a Prescott-based Extreme Edition processor was no doubt inevitable, and the move does bring 64-bit support, but it’s an even trade. Go buy an Athlon 64 3500+ if want a gamer’s CPU. It’s faster than any Extreme Edition, and you can pocket the $727 you save (or better yet, buy an obscenely expensive graphics card.) Personally, I’d rather have a Pentium 4 660 than an Extreme Edition 3.73GHz. Without SpeedStep or the C1E halt state, the Extreme Edition is less attractive than its 600-series siblings.

Intel’s Pentium 4 600 series processors
The Tech Report