Part 1: Intel Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 955

Intel Processor 955 Extreme Edition Temperatures

Intel 840EE Versus Intel 955EE Idle Temperatures:

The Intel 840 and Intel 955 both came with identical cooling solutions, so we thought we would take a look at both of the processors on our test bed. We removed the thermal pad on the retail heat sink and applied Arctic Silver Lumiere, which doesn’t require a break in ( We tried to keep the numbers as consistent as possible). We thought it would be good to start off with the Intel 840 Extreme Edition first and found that at idle on the desktop the processor ran at 45C.

Moving along to the Intel Processor 955 Extreme Edition we see a 6C rise in temperatures.

Many of the people I talked to about the Presler before it was launched was under the impression that the processor temperatures would decrease when Intel moved over to the new 65nm process, but as you can tell that is not the case. They forgot to add in that doubling the cache from 2MB to 4MB is a lot of cache that tends to get warm when used.

Intel 840EE Versus Intel 955EE Power Consumption:

When it came to power consumption the results were in-line with what we expected after seeing the temperature numbers. The Intel 840EE at idle on the desktop sucked up 159 Watts of power like nothing while the Intel 955EE used 185 Watts on the same exact test bench. It looks to us like the extra cache is power hungry. To get some “load” numbers we fired up Futuremark’s 3DMark 2005 and got some interesting results. The Intel 840EE peaked out at 317 Watts while the Intel 955EE peaked at 312 Watts. These results were confirmed on a number of different CPU intensive benchmarks. Looks like the Intel Pentium 955 Extreme Edition Processor consumes more at idle and less at load than the previous generation Intel dual-core processors.

Enough with the bad let’s take a look at some good… To Overclocking we go!