Review Philosophy

The premise of the extreme series of Intel chips is to present a chip to the higher and enthusiast users that is the fastest chip on the market right out of the box, and to include with this the highest levels of performance to go along with the package. Also part of the Intel extreme CPU philosophy comes the ability to adjust the core multiplier for added ability in tweaking and overclocking the performance of these high end chips. Most of the attention for these chips is, however, found in their exceptional stock performance for those high end users looking to have the biggest and best chip without having to do anything in the way of overclocking it.

Those most interested in this processor will be demanding users who run systems for processing intensive tasks, such as workstations for media and video editing, gaming, and encoding based systems. Though overclocking is a viable option when considering this CPU, it is not the primary function of this extreme series chip. The Core i7 965 Extreme holds its ground as an extremely powerful CPU right out of the box in stock trim, for the power users who need a very powerful system, but who don’t want to be bothered with overclocking in order to gain this level of power.

This leads us to this review of the Core i7 965 Extreme, in which I will thoroughly test this processor with our full suite of benchmarks to see how well this chip performs in stock trim against the Core i7 920 and the AMD Phenom II X4 955, AMD’s flagship quad core chip. Further, I will perform an overclock on this chip utilizing the multiplier and/or the base clock to test the abilities of overclocking, though that is not the primary focus of this review. This chip stands as a flagship performance based chip for the Nehalem family, and will thus be tested to see if it is worthy of reigning supreme as the top of the heap for Intel CPUs.