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The Xeon MP 'Gallatin' is built for 4-way multiprocessor systems and was available in models ranging from 2GHz to 3GHz. Basically Gallatin is a Northwood core with extra L2/L3 cache. > Read more

Just before AMD launched the AMD Athlon 64, Intel announced the Pentium 4 Extreme Edition (September 2003; IDF Fall) to be able to compete with AMD's top products. The first Extreme Editions came at 3.2GHz and 3.4GHz using a Gallatin core (130nm, 512KB L2 and 2MB L3 cache) with socket 478. The Gallatin core was already available for the high-end Xeon MP server CPU's. Monday 3 November 2003 is the date when the 3.2GHz Extreme Edition was officially introduced.

My 3,46GHz Extreme Edition is made in the 20th week of 2004 and was officially introduced on 1 November 2004. It's still made on the 130nm process but needs a LGA775 socket. This makes it the only 130nm LGA775 CPU ever made. Intel introduced the 3,46GHz EXtreme Edition along with the i925XE chipset which is able to work with the 266MHz (QDR1066) FSB.

Because this CPU is made on a 130nm process it's not compatible with every motherboard. It will run with motherboards based on the i925XE chipset and perhaps it will also run on a few motherboards with i965 chipset. My Intel i945, Gigabyte i965 and Gigabyte P35 motherboards did not work with this CPU. The nForce 7050 did work for a few seconds but burned out. The ASRock 775Dual-VSTA with VIA PT880 chipset works fine, however. Please take the PT880Pro chipset (which is probably slower than the i925XE) into account while reading the benchmarks.

Compared to the Prescott CPU's this Gallatin runs very cool. It clearly shows the superiority of the energy consumption the 130nm CPU's had compared to the 90nm ones. > Read more