Review: Intel's Core™ 2 Extreme QX9650: Holding the Field

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Test Results - Real World

Moving onto real world applications, Microsoft’s FSX Acceleration, the first retail expansion to FSX, was just released last week. FSX’s performance has proven to be extremely CPU-bound, so let’s see if Acceleration changes the situation.

The QX9650 shows a fairly substantial performance lead against the two older processors at both low setting resolutions, and the quad-core QX6850 slightly outperforms the dual core under those settings. Once the game is configured to high settings, however, the numbers shrink to a few mere frames difference among the three CPUs.

IL-2: 1946 is a compilation release of all of Maddox Games’ "Sturmovik" simulations over the last several years. While quickly aging, the title is still very popular among flight sim enthusiasts, particularly for its online play. The title was configured to run in OpenGL mode and its 1946 Lightning track was used for this article’s testing.

The QX9650 again nudges slightly ahead of the two older processors, with the previous generation parts producing almost identical scores across all test settings.

Falcon 4: Allied Force was tested using SimHQ’s Korean Air and Ground recordings. Using an outdated graphics engine from the late ‘90s, Allied Force was tested at just 1280x1024.

Allied Force’s scores are a wash, with none of the QX9650’s enhancements allowing the new processor to outscore the previous generation CPUs.

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