Many weeks ago our FedEx driver arrived with a surprise: Intel had shipped us a few Kentsfield CPUs. The minute they arrived, we quickly put together some bench configurations to test the processors capabilities. Assembly went off without a hitch; it was effortless to put the configurations together and get them to post. We installed our standard 650-watt power supply, a Voodoo heatsink, some Corsair memory, and a pair of ATI Radeon X1900XTX cards in Crossfire. It wasn’t until we started to load test our samples that we thought there was something wrong with the CPUs.

To give you an idea of what we witnessed, you must understand that our techs test hardware using some of the most rigorous methods in the industry. We normally start by softwaring the machine from scratch, followed by a custom benchmark suite called Haiti. Haiti was designed to bring any and all hardware to its knees as it continuously executes multiple games and benchmarks with escalating demands. Our Kentsfield platforms didn’t seem to have a problem running through the suite over a 24-hour period. This is standard procedure for us in our final testing prior to shipping a machine. If our systems do not pass a full run of Haiti, we will not ship the machine to a customer.

I then asked the team to kick it up a notch and do whatever they could to sweat the hardware. I knew that if we killed a CPU it wasn’t a big deal as we were working with engineering samples—it’s always important to understand the limitations.

Our lead tech on the project decided to run a torture test consisting of four instances of Prime95 while running Far Cry in a looping “max settings” demo. Still no trouble, so he ran four instances of Prime95 while viewing a DVD with multiple applications sitting idle in the background to eat memory. The system still had 10% of its CPU resources left to spare. To put this in perspective, usually two instances of Prime will cripple any dual-core CPU at any level of performance. Not only did this machine run through the most intense benchmark without breaking a sweat, it blew away our expectations with the DVD test.

To make things interesting, I had the tech remove the fan from the CPU and leave the heatsink on. Under normal tasks everything seemed OK and the temperature hardly increased. This is where I thought for sure something was wrong with the hardware (because most systems would have crashed by now), but further tests proved that the CPU was running at full throttle the entire time.

After about 30 minutes of tinkering, the system finally tapped out. To ensure that the hardware wasn’t to blame for the odd no-fan behavior, we attempted the same thing on the other configurations—all of them yielded more or less the same results.

There is clearly something amazing about this processor; it is easily my most-wanted CPU for 2006. Not only does this machine run cooler than the AMD Athlon FX or Core 2 Duo Extreme, but it seems to run more applications at one time without breaking a sweat.

We all know AMD has some strength where multitasking is concerned, thanks in large part to its chips’ integrated memory controllers, but Kentsfield has raised the bar. In fact, after the initial tests we ran I would say that architectural differences won’t matter when Kentsfield comes to town—the proof will be in the benchmarks.

Now imagine the possibilities with an advanced liquid cooling system, some high-end memory, a top-shelf motherboard, and a bit of overclocking. Granted, our chips were engineering samples so the production modules may yield different results, but from what we’ve seen so far in our labs I think it’s safe to say that Kentsfield is a killer processor. We are certain that most of our high-end OMEN machines will ship with it.

Intel has done well, again; it’s time to give the Israeli engineers a raise, man!

Send your opinions to this opinionated guy at rahul@cpumag.com.