Finally, the tests we're sure many of you have been waiting for. Do the new Pentium 4 6XX Sequence and Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.73GHz processors have what it takes on the gaming battlefront? Let's have a look at that next.

Unreal Tournament 2004 DirectX 8 Gaming Performance

Note: P4 3.46GHz EE=Gallatin Core | P4 3.73GHz=Prescott 2M Core

Unreal Tournament 2004 has always and forever been an AMD Athlon 64-favored test, no matter how you slice it, so we're not seeing anything new here. Beyond that, as you'll note, the additional 1MB of L2 cache offers a smallish performance gain for the 6XX series chips, and here the 3.73GHz P4 EE is only about on par with a 3.46GHz P4 EE, even though it has a significant clock speed advantage. 

3DMark05 Default Gaming Test DirectX 8/9 Gaming Performance

Note: P4 3.46GHz EE=Gallatin Core | P4 3.73GHz=Prescott 2M Core

And 3DMark05 from Futuremark shows similar results with the exception that performance is more closely tied to clock cycles among the Pentium 4 entries. The Pentium 4 660 looks to be the sweet spot for the new P4 lineup, offering 99% of the new Extreme Edition P4's performance. The P4 650 puts up a solid showing, as well but nothing nothing from the P4 side of the river is within striking distance of the Athlon 64.