Date:
Thursday , September 28, 2006
Author:
Paul Jastrzebski
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Core 2 Quad QX6700 Performance Preview

Intel allowed us a few minutes with their upcoming quad-core processor code named Kentsfield. We got to run a few benchmarks and have them here to share with our readers.

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Test Setup

The specifications of our test system are the following:

PROCESSOR: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 (8MB Cache, 2.66GHz, 1066MHz FSB) and Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (4MB Cache, 2.93GHz, 1066MHz FSB)

MOTHERBOARD: Pre-Production Intel® BadAxe 2 Desktop Mother Board D975XBX 2

GRAPHICS CARD: eVGA nVidia* Geforce* 7950 GX2 (1GB Memory)

GRAPHICS DRIVER: 91.47

MEMORY: 2x1GB Corsair* DDR2 1066 5-5-5-15 set to DDR2 800 4-4-4-12 in BIOS

HARD DRIVE: Seagate* Barracuda* 320GB 7200.10 7200RPM

OPTICAL DRIVE: Sony* DVD-ROM DDU1615

OPERATING SYSTEM: Microsoft* Windows* XP Service Pack 2

Synthetic Testing

3DMark 06

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In our 3DMark06 tests, we see Intel’s new Core 2 Extreme QX6700 outperform the Conroe based Core 2 Extreme X6800 quite handedly. 3DMark06 is capable of taking advantage of the QX6700’s four cores in it’s CPU test portion, therefore giving the QX6700 a higher overall 3DMark score.

PCMark05

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Since not every individual test within PCMark05 can take advantage of four simultaneous threads at once, we actually see the Core 2 Extreme X6800 score higher than the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 in our PCMark05 tests. The approximate 300MHz difference between the two CPU’s will make the X6800 faster in just about every benchmark that won’t take advantage of four simultaneous threads at once, and it may be because of this single reason that we weren’t able to test any real-world games during IDF (no games out now take advantage of four threads). But since the actual PCMark05 CPU test does take advantage of four threads, we do see the QX6700 score higher there.