Even though Intel is an incontestable leader in the segment of top-end desktop x86 processors, and even though single-socket quad-core solutions for this price range are offered only by Intel so far, this manufacturer continues to please users who are ready to pay any money for ultimate performance with newer and faster CPUs. Today we are going to review another champion: Intel Core 2 eXtreme QX6850. It's even faster than the previous Intel's favourite, to say nothing of the last but one. It has a higher core clock, of course, and a higher FSB clock of 1333 MHz (QP). As a result, our testbed went euphoric and its results rose as high as the sky. :) Jokes aside, it's a top solution, what else can we say. It will hardly be affordable to many users. They can just admire the test results and feel the inexorable pace of the technical progress that leads us to bright future, when such processors are called Celerons. :)
* - "2 x ..." means per core;
** - for AMD processors this is memory controller bus clock rate;
*** - measured differently for Intel and AMD processors; impossible to compare directly.
Software
Windows XP Professional x64 edition SP1
3ds max 9 x64 edition
Maya 8.5 x64 edition
Lightwave 3D 9 x64 edition
MATLAB R2006a (7.2.0.32) x64 edition
Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 2.0
SolidWorks 2005
Photoshop CS2 (9.0)
Visual Studio 2005 Professional
Apache HTTP Server 2.2.4
CPU RightMark 2005 Lite (1.3) x64 edition
WinRAR 3.62
7-Zip 4.42 x64 edition
FineReader 8.0 Professional
LAME 3.97
Monkey Audio 4.01
OGG Encoder 2.83
Windows Media Encoder 9 x64 edition
Canopus ProCoder 2.01.30
DivX 6.4
Windows Media Video VCM 9
x264 v.604
XviD 1.1.2
F.E.A.R. 1.08
Half-Life 2 1.0
Quake 4 1.3
Call of Duty 2 1.2
Serious Sam 2 2.07
Supreme Commander 1.0.3220
Testing
Essential foreword to charts
Our test method has two peculiarities of data representation: (1) all data types are reduced to one - integer relative score (performance of a given processor relative to that of Intel Core 2 Duo E4300, given its performance is 100 points), and (2) detailed results are published in this Microsoft Excel table, while the article contains only summary charts by benchmark classes. We will nevertheless focus your attention on detailed results, when needed.
3D Modeling and Rendering
If we have a look at detailed test results, we'll see that the four cores do not help in all operations except rendering, they are even interfering with performance (both QX processors are outperformed by the X6800). But owing to the huge advantage in rendering speed (this process can be distributed between cores almost perfectly) the total score of quad-core processors is still much higher.
CAD/CAE
To all appearances, QX6850 gains an advantage owing to a higher core clock rate plus a faster bus (you cannot explain this victory only by the clock rate), not because of additional two cores (or QX6700 would have outperformed X6800).
Digital Photo Processing
The most popular operations and filters in Adobe Photoshop cope well with distributing the load between two or four cores. It's a rare example of a popular program that is ready for quad-core processors even now.
Compile
Despite the official support for multithreaded operation, MS Visual Studio 2005 compiler failed to use four cores effectively: the advantage of QX6850 over X6800 fits in their frequency difference.
Web server
We have already noted that Apache Benchmark leads Intel quad-core processors into some strange stupor. Here is another proof: four cores at 3 GHz are outperformed (even if nominally) by two cores at 2.93 GHz. How could it happen? We've come up with only one hypothesis so far: a lot of threads jump from core to core with a non-shared L2 cache and pollute it so much that caching becomes inefficient.
