Intel Core 2 QX6800

Intel's current King of the CPU Hill, looking down on all beneath it.

It was bound to happen – given that the QX6700 would happily go up to a multiplier of 11, it was proven that Intel’s quad-core could reach 2.93GHz from 2.66GHz, paving the path for an official release – the QX6800.

With it comes all the Core 2 goodness we now know and love, although being an Extreme Edition chip it attracts a gargantuan price tag as well.

There’s nothing new here short of the bumped speed – it still features virtualisation, runs on a 1066MHz bus, 2MB cache per core and clock for clock beats the living pants off AMD’s current competitor.

Plugging it into our standard EVGA 680i motherboard with a 150GB Raptor and 2GB of OCZ Flex XLC 9200, it scored 1m 42.875s in SuperPi (4M digits), 1524CB in Cinebench, 52s in Lame-MT (icl variant, --alt-preset extreme settings with a 30m WAV file), 2m 24s for VirtualDub (compressing a 1GB raw AVI to 1300Kb/s XviD) and 6m 39s in WinRAR (compressing the same 1GB raw AVI file using standard compression). This is compared to 1m 42.942s, 1318CB, 57s, 2m 34s and 7m 33s for the same respective benchmarks on a QX6700. While SuperPi barely benefited, everything else gained a significant boost – although compared to an X6800 the chip was only one second faster in VirtualDub and LameMT, indicating the multi-threading isn’t massively advantageous beyond two cores.

Those who are sensible in the home market will simply get a lower-priced dual-core processor and ramp the FSB until the other components can’t take it any more (as most will happily hit 3GHz) – however for business users, those who require intact warranties, simply don’t like messing with systems or outright need the benefits of four cores in the one CPU, then this thing is the very best you can get.


RRP price $1899
Street price $1500
Supplier Intel
Website www.intel.com
Specifications Socket 775; four cores; 2.93GHz; 2MB cache per core; virtualisation; 65nm.