Gamers get power boost from Intel

Players of games like Half-Life demand high performance

Chip giant Intel has released a version of its Pentium 4 processor, specifically geared-up for PC gamers.

The Pentium 4 Extreme Edition has a fast processor speed of 3.2 GHz, to boost how games play.

It has more power and memory to process complex code and data, and Intel claims it has better graphics preloading ability for high-end games.

Several desktop PC makers said they would be using the new processor, including Dell and Gateway.

Power games

The powerful chip was first announced in September, a week before rivals Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) launched its super-fast 64-bit Athlon FX processor, also aimed at gamers.

With the growing popularity of graphics-intensive PC games like Unreal Tournament, Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, chip and PC makers are constantly trying to keep up with the demands of gamers.

PENTIUM 4 EXTREME EDITION Clock speed 3.2 GHz 2MB of Level 3 cache Hyperthreading technology Costs $925 (£550) Available in: Gateway 700GX, Alienware's Area-51 Extreme gaming PC, Dell's Dimension XPS desktop

Such games require high-performance machines and processors in order to work out and run complicated and huge amounts of code to make the game's on-screen physics more realistic.

Gateway has already said it will include the processor in its new gaming PC, the 700GX.

The Pentium 4's improved performance will make the desktop PC more powerful until the Prescott, a 90-nanometer version of the Pentium 4, comes out later in the year.

The 90-nanometer chip technology has much smaller individual wire and transistor gate widths, which means better performance and lower power consumption is packed into the processor.

The release comes just days after Microsoft announced it was dumping Intel chips for IBM processors to use in its next generation of the Xbox games console, expected in 2005.

The Xbox has been using Intel's Pentium III processors since the console's launch in 2001.