Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 review

Although the Core 2 Duo remained the best value choice for most desktop users, the technological achievement was nonetheless there as AMD had - and in a way still is - without a proper answer. Clocked at 2.66GHz the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 was essentially two Core 2 Duo E6700 processors stuck together. This meant that the thermal design power rating was doubled from 65 watts for the E6700, to a hot 130 watts for the QX6700. Performance-wise the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 was a success, though it was more of a business-oriented processor. This was largely due to the fact that games are only now becoming dual-core friendly and almost none are ready for quad-core processors. In the other hand, certain applications such as Adobe Photoshop and QuickTime Pro showed reasonably strong performance gains when using the quad-core Intel processor. Then other more powerful applications, such as 3D Studio Max and Pinnacle Studio Plus, saw massive performance gains when moving to the quad-core processor. Now some eight months later little has changed, dual-core still provides the same gaming experience while the quad-cores are somewhat better at graphic design and video editing tasks. Since the launch of the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 there have only been two other quad-core releases by Intel. The Core 2 Extreme QX6800 and Core 2 Quad Q6600, which were released at $1199 and $851, respectively. The new Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 processor we are testing today is the first Core 2 product to hit the magical 3.0GHz marker, and it is doing it not with two but rather four cores (dual 4MB L2 cache). Also new for the Core microarchitecture is a bumped up front side bus which has been taken to 333MHz QDR (Quad Data Rate – 1333MHz), whereas previous Core 2 processors all used a 1066MHz FSB.

Source: KezNews