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Not going to bother watching Youtube videos. At least there's a transcript on the web UI now, easy to put into your favorite LLM and get the summary: Intel Pentium D Extreme 965: The Ultimate Netburst CPU The Intel Pentium D Extreme 965, launched in March 2006, was the pinnacle of Intel's infamous Netburst architecture. The Netburst architecture, introduced in 2000 with the Pentium 4, aimed to push clock speeds higher by deepening the pipeline. While initially successful with the Northwood generation, the subsequent Prescott chips struggled with heat and performance issues despite their 31-stage pipeline. To compete with AMD's Athlon X2 dual-core processors, Intel hastily fused two Prescott Pentium 4 dies together, creating the Pentium D. The Pentium D Extreme 965, the ultimate Netburst CPU, featured two cores with hyperthreading at 3.73 GHz, a 1066 MT/s front-side bus, and 4 MB of L2 cache. To test the Pentium D Extreme 965's capabilities, it was paired with an Asus P5 Pro motherboard, 16 GB of DDR3 RAM, a Scythe Mugen cooler, a SATA 3 SSD, a GTX 1060 GPU, and a Corsair RM 1000x power supply. The setup ran smoothly on Windows 10, and overclocking the CPU to 4.6 GHz yielded a nearly 23% performance increase. In synthetic benchmarks, the overclocked Pentium D Extreme 965 performed well against older CPUs like the Pentium Core 2 Duo but struggled to match the quad-core Core 2 Quad QX6700. Daily tasks such as browsing, office work, and even 1080p video editing in DaVinci Resolve were surprisingly snappy, likely aided by the 16 GB of DDR3 RAM. YouTube playback was smooth at 1080p 60 FPS and watchable at 1440p 60 FPS. Gaming performance was impressive for an 18-year-old CPU. Battlefield 5's 64-player multiplayer ran at 10-12 FPS, GTA 5 at 20-25 FPS, Rise of the Tomb Raider at 23 FPS, and Doom 2016 at over 40 FPS using the Vulkan API. Power draw at stock speeds was around 93 watts, lower than the 130-watt TDP. Overclocking to 4.6 GHz increased power draw to over 160 watts, while undervolting at stock speeds reduced it to a frugal 63 watts. In conclusion, the Pentium D Extreme 965, while outclassed by its successor, the Core 2 Quad QX6700, still managed to deliver decent performance in modern tasks and games, especially when overclocked. It stands as a testament to the best of Intel's worst architecture and showcases the potential of Netburst when pushed to its limits. |