Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965: The Last of a Dying Breed
 

We were given a pleasant surprise by Intel at IDF just a few weeks ago: a fully functional and benchmark-able system based on Intel's next-generation desktop processor, codenamed Conroe. The performance that we saw was stunning and the power efficiency promised is a welcome change from the Pentium 4's NetBurst micro-architecture. But after leaving sunny California and returning to reality, we found another Intel chip in our labs; it just wasn't Conroe.

With the heatspreader on top of the chip, you could hardly tell it apart from a Conroe. It looked and smelled like one, but that's where the similarities end. While the fastest Conroe based processors will barely exceed 3.0GHz, this chip is clocked at a mighty 3.73GHz.