If you remember, in our previous review on the Intel P6 660, we had mentioned that the Pentium 4 660 is at the top of Intel's 64-bit family line, if we don't consider the existence of the Extreme Edition series at 3.73Ghz. Well, now is the time for the Extreme Edition Pentium at 3.73Ghz to make its mark.

The P4 at 3.73Ghz, reported excellent performance in all of our tests. The 660 was very good, but the P4 ED is even better. Any type of conversion process was such a simple matter with the Extreme Edition P4. And where game performance with the Intel 660 was very good, the new P4 ED CPU increased the frame rates even more. It seems that having the FSB at 1066Mhz helps this. It is worth mentioning that the P4 ED achieved a score of 5791.0 in PCMark04 and 5536.0 in the CPU test of 3DMark05 when the P4 660 had 5431.0 and 5180.0 and the AMD 4000+ 4521.0 and 4753.0 for the same tests.

However, for all these good things there is a small price to pay and I'm not referring to the price, which we will discuss shortly. The temperature of the P4 ED CPU is very high, even in idle state, close to 50 °C and the power consumption more than any of the other CPUs in the Intel series (i.e. the 5xx and 6xx).

The price for Pentium 4 3.73Ghz Extreme Edition retail package is close to US$1050. If we set aside the high price for now, the performance of this CPU was great, as we have already mentioned. But we are curious to see how this can compare with the Pentium 4 670 at 3.8Ghz, which is at least US$150 cheaper, or even better, with the new AMD 4800+ Dual Core that costs about the same money.

We hope soon, to be able to satisfy our curiosity on this. Stay tuned...