Introduction

 

It is no secret that the Pentium Extreme Edition CPU is Intel's push on the enthusiast market. The Pentium-XE as we call it supports two cores with Hyper-Threading on each allowing a maximum of four recognisable CPU's. Now for current games, we don't see any advantage, as most games can't even take advantage of two CPU's but for the multimedia masses and multitask who want to run not only a game, but a video as well as a MP3 ripping at the same time, this CPU is definitely going to be the goods for you.

 

One thing though is chipset support. While nVidia was supposed to have support for the Pentium-XE with the nForce 4 Intel Edition, it didn't turn out to have any - in fact, only one company has managed to get it working on this chipset, and not very well, but this is a discussion for a later article. This leaves only one chipset supporting the Pentium-XE at the time of writing, the I955X from Intel.

 

Gigabyte sent us their GA-8I955X Royal motherboard, their own attempt at putting a motherboard on the premium chopping blocks for the end users wanting the best performance and features to purchase.

 

Does it have we it takes to beat out our resident I955X powerhouse, the ASUS P5WD2? Read on to find out as we take a real close look at the motherboard from Gigabyte.