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As you can see from the SysMark 2004 scores it achieved exactly the same overall score of 232. It was outpaced in Internet Content Creation, while it was faster in the Office Productivity test.

It’s a good score but it’s far behind the sort of scores we’ve seen from an AMD Athlon X2 4800+.

In PC Mark 05 the Presler healthily outpaces the higher clocked 840 by a comfortable margin overall, mainly thanks to a superior CPU score, and it falls slightly behind in all the other tests.

It’s POV-Ray (3.7 beta) that does all the talking for the Presler though. A single-core Hyper-Threaded 840 can finish in just over 11 minutes, but the dual-core Hyper-Threaded Presler destroys that, coming in almost twice as fast at 6 minutes 17 seconds. When an application is well optimised the benefits of dual-core over a faster single threaded CPU are clear.

In operation the Presler felt silky smooth to use. It was possible to encode a CD in iTunes, encoding a video using DivX, run an anti-virus scan and then launching a game which was fine to play. This was simply not possible on the 3.73GHz 840 EE.

Verdict

So the Presler is a powerhouse and the best Extreme edition yet, but as ever the verdict remains the same. We wouldn’t buy one over other Intel CPUs as its far from great value for money and AMD still rules for gaming. But if you have to have the best that Intel has to offer for the desktop, then the new Extreme Edition delivers. What will be interesting is what Intel does in the future with the Extreme Edition. Somehow its modern Performance for Watt ethos and the Extreme Edition moniker don’t really gel. So if you have the cash and you’re an Intel fanboy grab this EE while you can. We may not see its like again.

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