So with that in mind, I enlisted the help of EPoX and sneakily plundered the mighty Intel to give the XE some proper work to do. Asetek were also more than willing to help and tooled me up with the Pentium 4 mounting hardware that I'd need for a Socket 478 board. Finally, just to make things interesting, I didn't use any old Pentium 4 processor. That would have been far too easy. Instead I procured the range topping Athlon FX-51 counter punch, the 3.2GHz Extreme Edition.


Compared to the regular 3.2GHz Pentium 4, the Extreme Edition adds 2MB of L3 cache memory to the mix. Essentially a 2MB L3 Xeon processor (the CPU revision code even matches a Gallatin-class Xeon) sandwiched into the Socket 478 form factor, it's as mighty a processor to cool as you can obtain today. With a higher transitor count than an Athlon FX-51 and regular Pentium 4 3.2Ghz put together, its 231mm² die size, 1.55V core voltage and all that L3 cache memory will conspire to make things very difficult for the XE when overclocked. L3 cache runs at core clock speed, with a latency penalty for accesses the only hindrance to maximum performance.


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My Webpage' ">http://www.geocities.com/fil_rios/forever
When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing more to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader.

To me the EE seemed like a good idea, but so far has yet to give any impact back.

Intel has a shortage of these CPUs and they are also very expensive.
(More then any FX)

There are a few reasons for this:
More transistors due to Cache size increases the die size, making each CPU more expensive.
Cache is the most susceptible area to manufacturing processing errors, where the failure of a single transistor can cause and entire bank of transistors to fail.
This means that you get less yield per wafer.

Personaly I am not too worried about it, as it seems like a rare CPU to find.
But it sounds like a good idea on Intels part.

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' ">http://www.ZapWizard.com
The opinions expressed above do not represent the views of Advanced Micro Devices or any of their affiliates.

If you consider a last minute trump card as a good idea, then yeah it was.

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Intel Core i7 860
ASUS P7P55D-E Pro
Corsair HX650W
Corsair XMS DDR3-1333 (4GB @ 8-8-8-24)
Sapphire Radeon HD 6870
Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB
Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB

Well the OEM and Retail EEs just dropped on Newegg.

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DFI nFII Ultra Infinity
Barton 2800+ [ 250 x 10 , 2.0V ] , SP-97
Mushkin Black Level II PC3500 [ 3.2V , 11-2-2-2.0 ]
Radeon 9700 Pro , WD360 Raptors [Raid 0]
Antec TC 550 , Klispch ProMedia 4.1

DLT3C 1800+ , 8rda+ , HyperX PC3000 BH-5