Intel’s Core 2™ Extreme QX6700: Quad Core Performance Preview Page 3

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Synthetic Testing

Windows Media Encoder 9 was used for SimHQ’s content creation test. The application is a free download from Microsoft and greatly benefits from systems capable of accelerating its multithreaded design. Falcon 4: Allied Force’s intro movie, a 91 MB AVI file, was converted into a WMV file with high definition video and audio settings and the total time required by each processor to convert the file recorded. Shorter conversion times represent a better score for this particular test.

Windows Media Encoder apparently only scales with two cores, since the QX6700 failed to process the conversion much faster than the similarly clocked E6700. The X6800 completed the conversion almost a full minute sooner than either part, due to its higher clock speed.

Next for synthetic performance testing, Futuremark’s PCMark05 CPU and memory suites of tests were used. The CPU suite has two tests that run four distinct tasks, which should give the QX6700 a distinct advantage.

The CPU suite’s total score saw the X6800’s higher clock rate outperform the E6700, while the QX6700 in turn produced a fairly significant 1,000+ point lead over the X6800. The memory suite, however, saw a score closer to that of the E6700, most likely due to clock rate similarity. The smaller tests within the memory suite test cache performance, which explains the X6800’s higher score despite the identical system memory used for all three processors.

3DMark06’s two CPU tests were also used to see how these processors differentiated their performances. The CPU tests are highly threaded, so the QX6700’s additional cores should outperform even the X6800 and its higher clock speed.

While these tests saw very little difference between the two Core 2 Duo processors, the QX6700 truly shined here, outperforming both dual-core parts by over 50%. Futuremark has long marketed their benchmark suites — particularly the 3DMark series — as designed for gamers and indicative of current and future game performance, so we can only hope that the suite is indeed a good harbinger of the QX6700’s potential.

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