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The Verdict

Well as stated this was a quick review to show at the very least the overall impression of this new platform. I think it's fair to say that the new 925XE chipset again offers slightly better performance over the previous chipset, all that thanks to it's renewed and faster FSB. That 1066 MHz FSB offers roughly 10-15 percent more performance over that previous 800 MHz FSB product. Gaming wise, well... you'll not see a huge difference at all, 5 percent maybe if you graphics card isn't limiting you that is. Intel still has a difficult time battling AMD's Athlon 64 price and performance in that area. But let's not forget that Intel offers these small things we take for granted so easily, Hyper-Threading for your multitasking intensive applications for example. Overall we could state that AMD is a tiny bit better for the gamers though, yet don't fool yourself as I doubt you would actually notice that with the naked eye. Pentium systems, although not demonstrated in our tests due to time constraints simply rock when it comes to real world applications in the form of encoding media-streams etc etc. The Pentium 4 3.46 GHz EE then, with that huge Level 3 cache it offers serious good competition to AMD (ignoring price). Currently the EE processor is the only processor that can be used on this mainboard, but oh dear, that price. This processor right now is retailing at roughly a 1000 EUR. Now our primary gaming test-system is a 3.6 GHz Pentium 4 on an Intel i915P mainboard + 1 GB memory in total still does not cost a thousand bucks, yet nearly performs the same from that gaming point of view. That's something you should think about okay ?

So let sum things up, in retrospect, the new 1066 MHz products offer a nice yet small performance increase over the last generation product. You could say this is the bigger brother of the 6 month old 925 chipset The chipset simply has an improved FSB, a small but yes, worthy improvement. We 'the media' tend to look only at the new features but let's not forget that this chipset already was loaded with fantastic features like DDR2, RAID, 1 Gigabit LAN, 8-channel sound in 192 kHz/32-bit quality, Matrix RAID, 4 native SATA 150 channels, PCI-Express. The mainboard itself was as expected, easy to install, very stable and performing really nicely. It has some nice overclocking and tweaking options at BIOS level, but also at software level with the help of Intel's Desktop Control Center Software. All in all it simply is an awesome platform to own and play with.

Intel's 925XE Express Chipset
With Pentium 4 3.46 GHz Extreme Edition
Manufacturer: Intel
Info: Intel.com