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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Real World Testing

The benchmarks on this page go more hand in hand with the sort of analysis tools we like to use in that they are more "real world" than purely synthetic benchmarks. These below represent real applications used by enthusiasts and professionals on an everyday basis and could very well show you what the power of a quad-core processor could actually do for you on your desktop.

DiVX Encoding

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For our DivX encoding tests, we used DivX 6.2.5 with XMPEG 5.03 to measure the amount of time it’d take to convert an uncompressed HD video into DivX.

And as you can see from the results, there is a very significant advantage when using four cores instead of two during encoding. The QX6700 is able to encode the movie 30 seconds faster than the X6800!

Sony Vegas 7.0a Build 115

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We also see the sheer horsepower of the QX6700 in our Sony Vegas 7.0a tests. Once again we were doing HD video encoding, but this time, the QX6700 finished over two minutes quicker than the X6800.

3D Studio Max 8 SP2

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3D Studio Max 8 SP2 showed similar results. The quad-core QX6700 rendered our scene 40% faster than the X6800, completing the render 29 seconds quicker.

POV-Ray Beta 15

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And finally, we can once again see the Core 2 Extreme QX6700’s four threaded dominance in our POV-Ray Beta 15 tests. The POV-Ray Beta 15 scoring is by pixels per second, with the QX6700 rendering more than 1137 pixels more per second than the dual-core X6800.

Benchmark Analysis and Conclusions

What we see from our preliminary testing with Kentsfield is that as we would expect, in situations where more than two threads are available, the Kentsfield based Core 2 Extreme QX6700 blows the Core 2 Extreme X6800 out of the water. The huge performance gap between the two CPUs can best be seen in our rendering and encoding benchmarks, all of which take full advantage of the QX6700’s four cores.

As we saw in our overall PCMark05 score, the QX6700 isn’t always faster than the X6800. To fit four cores onto one die, Intel had to decrease the clock speed on the QX6700 by 10%. This simply means that for applications that aren’t threaded, or can only take advantage of two threads at once (Quake 4, Call of Duty 2), the 2.66GHz QX6700 will be slower than the 2.93GHz X6800. We’ll have to wait a few weeks until we get Kentsfield in our labs to see exactly how much slower it will be.

But there is a great amount of anticipation for quad-core on the horizon. Many PC games, including Alan Wake, will ship with quad-thread support, and an increasing amount of CPU intensive applications will be rolling out further threaded versions of their applications in the coming months.

With that said, quad-core is the future and is here to stay. Our brief look at Kentsfield today was impressive, but we won’t make any final conclusions until we can put Kentsfield through it’s paces in our labs.

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