Intel Core 2 Quad QX6700

It turns out you can tame the four wild horses on this marvellous piece of silicon.

Are we here already? It was just on four months ago that we looked at Core 2 Duo, and we were blown away. Now suddenly we already have two more cores for the taking.


Sure, it’s just two Duos whacked on the one silicon slab, thus not using a shared cache and prompting AMD to denounce it as not true quad core. But for our money, it’s still four cores, and not for a magnificently high premium, if you consider this is the Extreme Edition. A non-Extreme Edition (Q6600, at 2.4GHz) should be arriving in Q1 of 2007. Don’t expect dual core to disappear though – there’s still plenty of miles left on the roadmap for it.


Of course with all these cores the general public is now entering the workstation arena, however unlike those lucky people we don’t have a huge bunch of power applications to take advantage of multithreading yet, especially in the gaming sector.


Things are improving – Valve is working on a multithreaded Source engine, and Crysis looks like it’s going that way too. In fact so is Supreme Commander – and we’ve some beta benchmarks here to prove it.


Previous reports had QX6700 on a 1333MHz FSB – not the case, as it runs at 1066 on a 10x multiplier. It also retains the 2MB cache per core of the high end Duos, giving a total of 8MB to work with.


Those who already have 965 boards or a Core 2 Duo capable 975X should have no problem slotting in a quad core CPU – but you’ll likely need a BIOS update first. For the rest, the updated board revisions to take better advantage of quad core should be hitting the shelves as we speak.


Grabbing the nearby EVGA nForce 680i, a Gigabyte 8800GTX and some Corsair PC2-8500 RAM we set about building one of the most ridiculously powered systems ever.


Comparing it with the 2.93GHz dual core X6800 was an interesting affair, accurately reflecting the state of multithreading today.


We set SuperPiMod calculating up to four million digits, which managed to use one full thread, but only partially hit the second and third cores according to Windows’ CPU usage monitor. Still enough to give an advantage.


Multithreaded LAME, oddly enough isn’t so much multithreaded as dual threaded, not even touching the third and fourth cores, the speed increase of the X6800 giving it an advantage. The same story follows for VirtualDubMod.


We start seeing some better advantages in WinRAR, and of course a massive upswing in Cinebench 9.5, thanks to the multithreaded side of rendering having been figured out years ago. Woot for render farms.


This doesn’t say much about games though, which traditionally have been single threaded. We wanted to see if the extra cores really did provide increased benefit in multithreaded games, or if we would only see a small improvement.


To that end our esteemed editor Logan Booker reached deep into his script hacking ability, scrounged up a beta of Supreme Commander, managed to unlock 8 AI players, started a game, focused in on a non-graphically intensive part of the map, set the details to their lowest, saved it and brought it in to be FRAPSed. Using the 680i we disabled the cores on the QX6700 and X6800 one by one and recorded the results.


The results are, to say the least, wonderful – only tapering off at the four core level. There is potential after all!


While at this stage we can only recommend the QX for workstation/power users and not gamers, the future is looking bright indeed.

	QX6700	X6800
SuperPiMod (lower is better)	1:42.942	1:46.328
LAME-MT (lower is better)	57s	53s
VirtualDubMod (lower is better)	2:34	2:25
WinRAR 3.61 (lower is better)	7:33	8:00
CineBench 9.5 (higher is better)	1318 CBMarks	891 CBMarks

Supreme Commander (fps)

Number of cores enabled	QX6700	X6800
1	19.950	21.550
2	36.650	47.950
3	51.417	N/A
4	56.767	N/A