Intel Quad Core Performance Preview
Do dual-core CPUs bore you? Check out Intel's new quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6700! Half the zazz, and twice the zip!
Intel's Core 2 Duo volley scored a solid hit on AMD, which had dominated the desktop performance segment for a number of years with the Athlon 64. The Core 2 Duo's gaming performance moved Intel out of the dreadful Pentium 4 performance backwaters into the processing lead in a single day. Upon release, the Core 2 Duo instantly became the processor of choice for gamers and power users alike.
Speed was king in the Pentium 4 era, but parallelism is the new mantra of the multicore age. When Intel's NetBurst P4 processors hit the GHz wall, the solution was to add more processing cores. If you can't go higher, go wider so-to-speak.
Unwilling to sit still and enjoy its newfound success, Intel decided to move up the quad-core "Kentsfield" CPU launch from the first half of 2007 to the last quarter of 2006. The Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 quad-core processor will be available by mid-November, just in time to go up against AMD's "Quad-father" 4x4 platform. The Core 2 Extreme QX6700 will carry the familiar $999 extreme processor price tag at launch.
Quad Core
Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX6700 follows Intel's new naming scheme to the letter. The Q signifies that the CPU has four processing cores, and the X, of course, makes it "extreme." The 6700 part of the moniker aligns perfectly with the rest of Intel's Core 2 processor lineup, as the QX6700 runs at 2.66GHz, the same speed as the Core 2 E6700 CPU. Each pair of CPUs has 4MB of L2 cache, bringing the total L2 for the entire processor to 8MB. Like other Core 2 CPUs, the quad runs on a 1066MHz front-side bus.The QX6700 will be built on a 65nm process and is 64-bit capable. Following the trend of other Extreme Edition processors, the processor will come unlocked, which will give system owners a wide range of overclocking multiplier options.
The Core 2 Extreme QX6700 is pin-compatible with the rest of the Core 2 family. The processor should work fine with Intel's "Badaxe" 2 motherboards. Third-party motherboard manufacturers will release BIOS updates for existing Core 2 motherboards to enable quad-core compatibility. Whereas the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 will work in most existing Core 2 motherboards, AMD's "Quad-father" platform will require a new dual socket motherboard to support two dual-core processors.
Performance Testing
We brought in an Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 and a 975X Express-based motherboard for some hands-on performance testing. We didn't have an AMD Athlon FX-62 in our labs to test against, but we used the Athlon 64 X2 5000+ as a fill-in. Trust us when we say that the FX-62 wouldn't have done much better. We stuck with a single GeForce 7900 GTX on the video card side to balance out the high-end CPU performance with an equally powerful graphics card. We also included encoding and extreme multitasking scenarios with our tests because few games currently support multicore processing.Are you going to upgrade to Intel's new quad-core CPU? Or do you think you'll stick with dual and single-core CPUs for a while longer?
Performance Tests
Conclusion:
Previously scheduled to make its debut sometime in early 2007, Intel's quad-core behemoth might be a little early. None of the games we tested take advantage of the QX6700's four processing cores. In all of our CPU limited game tests, the 2.66GHz QX6700 loses to the 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800 because of its clock speed disadvantage. The QX6700 makes a great showing in the 3DMark06 CPU test, but barely budges the overall score. The vast majority of PC games simply aren't built for multicore processing yet, but support is coming in several upcoming games including Supreme Commander, Alan Wake, Half-life 2: Episode 2, and Unreal Tournament 2007.
While the gaming advantage isn't quite there yet, the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 demolishes the competition in desktop applications. The quad-core CPU bested Intel's former flagship CPU by almost 30 percent in our video encoding test. The Core 2 Extreme QX6700 also performed well in our multitasking challenges where we encoded a video while running 3DMark06 simultaneously, shaving almost a minute and a half off the video-encode time of the nearest competitor and maintaining great gaming performance at the same time.
Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX6700 packs in a whole lot of performance, but it’s still probably early for the gaming crowd. You aren't going to miss much anyways, unless you happen to enjoy encoding videos and music while playing your favorite games. Regardless, the $999 price tag is daunting. Feel free to wait for the cheaper non-Extreme quad-cores when they come out in the first quarter of 2007.
System Setup: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700, Intel Core2 Extreme 2.93GHz, AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+, Intel 975XBX2, Intel 975XBX, ASUS A8N32 SLI, 2GB Corsair XMS Memory (1GB x 2), 160GB Seagate 7200.7 SATA Hard Disk Drive, Windows XP Professional SP2. Graphics Cards: Graphics Cards: GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB. Graphics Drivers: Nvidia Forceware 91.47.
Are you going to upgrade to Intel's new quad-core CPU? Or do you think you'll stick with dual and single-core CPUs for a while longer?
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