Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 review

The synthetic Everest benchmark holds no surprises: since only one core is tested, the performance of the Q6700 is virtually identical to that of the E6700. which is also clocked at 2.66GHz. The 2.93GHz X6800 tends to be a few percent quicker than its successor, which serves to paint a general picture of this and other Kentsfield reviews: users that do not put the processor to work on all fours; by multitasking and/or working with multithreaded applications - are better off with a cheaper dualcore.

	FX-62	X2 5000+	Opteron 2216	E6400	E6700	X6800	QX6700
Memory - Read	8.63 GB/s	8.01 GB/s	5.86 GB/s	10.89 GB/s	7.09 GB/s	7.10 GB/s	7.07 GB/s
Memory - Write	7.81 GB/s	7.29 GB/s	5.46 GB/s	4.72 GB/s	4.65 GB/s	4.71 GB/s	4.68 GB/s
Memory - Copy	6.56 GB/s	6.68 GB/s	4.73 GB/s	4.96 GB/s	5.05 GB/s	5.11 GB/s	5.04 GB/s
Memory - Latency	58.7 ns	58.5 ns	77.3 ns	68.0 ns	65.3 ns	64.4 ns	65.4 ns
L1 - Read	43.89 GB/s	40.75 GB/s	37.35 GB/s	33.32 GB/s	41.65 GB/s	45.82 GB/s	41.65 GB/s
L1 - Write	21.97 GB/s	20.41 GB/s	18.70 GB/s	33.23 GB/s	41.55 GB/s	45.70 GB/s	41.55 GB/s
L1 - Copy	37.84 GB/s	35.14 GB/s	32.21 GB/s	66.47 GB/s	83.09 GB/s	91.40 GB/s	83.09 GB/s
L1 - Latency	1.1 ns	1.1 ns	1.2 ns	1.4 ns	1.1 ns	1.0 ns	1.1 ns
L2 - Read	12.56 GB/s	11.67 GB/s	10.68 GB/s	15.37 GB/s	18.89 GB/s	20.81 GB/s	18.86 GB/s
L2 - Write	10.81 GB/s	10.07 GB/s	9.23 GB/s	11.58 GB/s	14.41 GB/s	16.03 GB/s	14.53 GB/s
L2 - Copy	12.60 GB/s	11.58 GB/s	10.73 GB/s	15.82 GB/s	21.14 GB/s	23.14 GB/s	21.04 GB/s
L2 - Latency	4.3 ns	4.6 ns	5.0 ns	3.5 ns	4.6 ns	4.2 ns	4.6 ns

That ends the obvious part of this review. The real question is which applications do profit from the new quadcore. To answer that, we shall be looking at Business Winstone 2004 Multitasking, which simulates a user that uses several programmes at the same time, among which Internet Explorer, Outlook, Access, Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Norton Anti- Virus, and WinZip. As can be seen, the results aren't that far apart, so it seems as if the processor isn't the bottleneck:

	Business Winstone 2004 Multitasking Test
	Core 2 Duo E6700	4.4
	Core 2 Extreme QX6700	4.36
	Core 2 Extreme X6800	4.28
	Athlon FX-62	4.25
	Core 2 Duo E6400	3.97
	Dual Opteron 2216	3.10

The second test is Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004, which simulates a user occupied with Adobe Premiere 6.5, Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1, Newtek LightWave 7.5b, Steinberg WaveLab 4.0f, Windows Media Encoder 9, and Macromedia Director MX 9.0. The actions executed here are tasks such as encoding video fragments, rendering a multimedia stage and applying filters to images. The various applications run side by side. Even though the expectation was that the Kentsfield would be in its element with this combination of heavy multimedia and multitasking, in practise the performance is disappointing. The two extra cores make for a lousy 4% performance increase, which can just as well be achieved by going from 2.66GHz to 2.93GHz:

	Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004
	Core 2 Extreme QX6700	46.6
	Core 2 Extreme X6800	46.3
	Core 2 Duo E6700	44.9
	Athlon FX-62	41.6
	Dual Opteron 2216	37.3
	Core 2 Duo E6400	36.8

To make the multitasking jobs somewhat more interesting, we reran Business Winstone, but this time with Quicktime 7.1 running in the background, which was busy encoding a movie into the H.264-format. Finally, the Kentsfield beats the competition by a fair degree:

	Business Winstone Multitasking Test + Quicktime (Winstone score)
	Core 2 Extreme QX6700	3.02
	Core 2 Duo E6700	2.50
	Dual Opteron 2216	2.29
	Athlon FX-62	2.19
	Core 2 Extreme X6800	2.13
	Core 2 Duo E6400	2.07

	Business Winstone Multitasking Test + Quicktime (QuickTime time)
	Core 2 Extreme QX6700	294.0
	Core 2 Extreme X6800	407.0
	Dual Opteron 2216	414.0
	Core 2 Duo E6700	429.7
	Core 2 Duo E6400	534.0
	Athlon FX-62	535.7