Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 Quad-Core

[Rob Williams]

Intel today is announcing their 1333FSB Core 2 line-up, which consists of three dual-cores, including the E6750 we previewed a few weeks ago, and also the 3.0GHz quad-core that we are testing out today. Read on as we explore all of what Intel's latest flagship processor has to offer.

You can read the full review here and discuss it here!

 

[NicePants42]

1st pic on the overclocking page appears to be mislabeled.

Nice read, Rob.

If you were to take some OC/Temp/power measurements with one or more cores disabled, I'd be very interested in seeing it.

In fact, should Intel start selling the E6850 and the Q6600 both for $266/k, I think it'd be worth a write-up comparing the overclockability of these CPUs.

Specifically, I want to think that in general, 2 of the 4 cores on a Q6600 should be able to overclock to speeds about equal to the slower core on an E6850 - but after seeing what the E6750 was capable of, I'm not so sure that this will be the case. A lot of people (myself included) have been anticipating a sub-$300 Q6600, but deciding what to buy might not be as easy as we thought if the choices are, for instance,
1) running an E6850 @ 3.8ghz
2) running 2 cores on a Q6600 @ 3.4ghz
3) running all 4 cores on a Q6600 @ 3.2ghz.
Sure, many will still prefer 4 cores, and the Q6600 numbers will probably be better, but now replace the $266 E6850 with the $189 E6750.

I'm excited about cheap quad-cores, but I'm a gamer, and there aren't many games that will use those extra cores yet. So I have to ask myself if it's worth paying more money for (potentially) slower performance, anticipating that performance will increase when games start using 4 cores. But then, why not buy a cheaper E6750 now and wait another quarter or two to get a quad?

 

[Rob Williams]

Thanks Nate, I have fixed that typo. It was a bad copy/paste. The board I am using right now cannot disable cores, but I will do so when I get another in. The P5K3 died on me before a final round of benchmarks, so I am going to work on getting a replacement, as it's a great testing board. Gigabytes P35C-DS3R is not as feature-robust.

As for overclocking with disabled cores... there's really no point that I can see. One thing I did test in the past, was taking the E6600 and pitting it against the Q6600 that had two cores disables (via Windows, not the BIOS), essentially forcing it to have the same properties as the E6600. Though you would imagine performance would be identical at that point, it was actually about 10% worse on the Q6600 with disabled cores, despite both still having two cores in use and being clocked the same.

I'm excited about cheap quad-cores, but I'm a gamer, and there aren't many games that will use those extra cores yet. So I have to ask myself if it's worth paying more money for (potentially) slower performance, anticipating that performance will increase when games start using 4 cores. But then, why not buy a cheaper E6750 now and wait another quarter or two to get a quad?

That's the thing. If someone values overclocking, Quad-Core is not really the way to go, unless you are looking for the highest numbers when benchmarking. For gaming and the like, overclocking a dual-core sky-high is the best bet. No sense of paying extra for a Quad-Core if you are not going to use it to it's full potential. But as shown, even some common applications will utilize four cores. Hopefully even more are on the way.

 

[NicePants42]

Anandtech took a pretty decent shot at my question (at stock speeds, anyway).

The 6850 has an 8 to 10 percent advantage in the games that were tested compared to the Q6600, and as much as I want to want the Q6600, the waters are very muddy when overclocking comes into play - you (and many other review sites) pulled 3.8ghz out of an E6750, but there isn't much info out there about common Q6600 OCs - even XS only has like 6 entries in an almost-database, ranging from 3.0 to 3.6ghz. Not exactly results to get enthusiastic over - maybe the new G0 stepping will help?

 

[Rob Williams]

Overclocking is always muddy, since it's really luck of the draw sometimes. My Q6600 has hit 3.4GHz stable if I recall correctly. It would go higher, but the core temps bothered me too much, so I kept it at a more modest clock speed. G0 does seem to be performing quite well. These new 1333FSB are fun to play with, to say the least.

 

[ultimaone]

supreme commander dual vs quad core

i think you need to look at the finer details of supreme commander
when it comes to dual vs quad core

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTMwNiw2LCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

yes the top frame rates are around the same
however, the average and minimum frame rates....makes the
game go from fairly playable, to wow this game is fun and never
slows down

honestly if anyone buys a dual core, when they can get
a quad for the same price, i really think is making
a foolish decision, multicore games are here and they
are going to be coming in force soon enough

unreal tournament 3 was built with the idea of multicore
from the start and that was started years ago