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Intel's 925XE Express Chipset
With Pentium 4 3.46 GHz Extreme Edition
Manu
facturer: Intel
Info: Intel.com
Roughly 6 weeks after the Intel's official announcement we received a call from an Intel spokesperson who asked if we would be interested in reviewing their latest mainboard chipset, the 925XE. Sure we handle a lot of mainboard reviews but we quite honestly never get requests to test the actual chipsets. So a bit surprised, I said sure! I completely forgot that it's the busiest time of the year, that's right, Christmas means silly season. We are backlogged with reviews articles and features. Ah well, you know what? A quickie mainboard review we can handle just fine.
Back in June Intel launched its new desktop line with the 915 and 925X chipsets. It offered great new technology, such as the PCI Express interface and that new sound concept called high definition integrated audio. The key feature of course was PCI Express with options in 16x and 1x busses, but also the introduction of LGA775, the new Pentium 4 Socket for the new 'Prescott' core based CPU's. A strong new platform that had to battle AMD's Athlon 64. A harsh battle as Intel's Prescott CPU's run rather hot and use up a lot of wattage compared to it's competitor.
So my friends, a few weeks ago we received a reference Intel D925XECV2 mainboard equipped with the breathtaking, yet unfortunately rather expensive, 3.46GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition to try out for a couple of weeks. Unfortunately is an understatement, the processor is 1000 EUR alone! But let's focus on the mainboard and chipset. Key primary feature you need to keep in mind is that this mainboard is capable of a lovely 1066 MHz system bus. Your average Pentium 4 mainboard these days run on the quad pumped 800 MHz front side bus, this one can handle a bit more (266 MHzx 4).
| 1066-MHz Front Side Bus (FSB) enables support for the latest Intel Pentium 4 Processor with HT Technology Extreme Edition at 3.46 GHz and above. | |
| 800-MHz FSB enables support for Intel® Pentium® 4 processors supporting HT Technology. | |
| Optimized for Hyper-Threading Technology to enable improved system performance and responsiveness. | |
| Enhanced performance architecture, with support for 1066-and 800MHz FSB processors and DDR2 memory, optimizes data transfers between the processor and system memory. | |
| Flexible memory support, with dual-channel DDR2 533/DDR2 400 memory, providing up to 8.53 GB/s memory bandwidth, in configurations up to a maximum of 4 GB of Random Access Memory (RAM). | |
| PCI Express* delivers up to 4 GB/s per direction for graphics bandwidth and up to 500 MB/s concurrent data transfers for I/O to support the most demanding applications. | |
| Intel® Matrix Storage Technology, with integrated Raid 0 and Raid 1 capabilities using the latest SATA interface, for accelerated disk I/O performance. | |
| Intel® High Definition Audio Technology's eight independent DMA audio engines can enable multiple separate, simultaneous audio streams. |
That being said, let's startup this review. The mainboard tested is the Intel Desktop Board D925XCV with the i925XE chipset, armed with an Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.46GHz.
