Conclusions

I hope that there are readers that have made it this far so we can attempt to tie things together. Unfortunately, I do not think there is a clear cut answer for the question that most people will ask: "what is the best?" Choosing parts for a new computer can be pretty overwhelming and our tests of the six processors on the three platforms illustrates this fact.

There are some things that we can say conclusively - the 925x is faster than the 915 platform but outside of gaming, the advantage of DDR2 does not seem to weigh too heavily into our test results with the 915 coming very close to the 925x in most instances. This does not hold true on the gaming front as a 925x paired with a slower processor was faster than the 915 with a faster processor in several instances. The only exception to this fact is MP3 encoding where the 915 held a small but consistent lead with all processors over the 925x.

For media encoding / PVR duties, the Prescott seems to be the way to go. Again with the exception of MP3 encoding, the Prescott is by far the fastest of the three cores as MPEG4 and MPEG2 encoding are signficantly faster. The EE tops out the MP3 encoding front but the difference is not as pronounced there as it was with the video tests.

Desktop performance is a wash. I do not think that the 925x or 915 hold any significant advantages for the end user. On the processor side it is a very tight contest between the 3.4EE and 3.6 Prescott with every thing else lining up fairly neatly with few surprises.

Gaming is a different matter. The EE is consistently faster in all our games. For the gamer currently on the Socket 478 platform looking for a processor upgrade it will be worthwhile to evaluate their current hardware setup and figure out if it is worthwhile to move to the 915/925x at this time. A transition to the 925x means a 925x board, DDR2, a new video card and a new processor. The move to the 915 is a bit less painful as some boards will accept DDR. It may be worth it to stick to the 865PE/875 and splurge on a 3.2EE as it may net higher performance at a lesser overall cost even though the EE demands a pretty high premium. For those that may be on a AMD or Pre Socket 478 system, the decision will not be as easy. My suggestion would be to stick with the Prescott and splurge on other areas.

I hope that our round up of the various processors and platforms that Intel currently has out may have answered a few questions for the reader looking at a new Intel system. There is no magic, one size fits all solution but we do have a thorough picture of what strengths each platform and processor brings to different tasks and ultimately it will be the educated end user that will have to pick and choose where their priorities lie.