In addition to our normal set of benchmarks, I decided to take a peek at how well Windows Vista handled the new CPU. Alas, I ran into a couple of problems here. There seems to be quite a few issues with benchmark compatibility under Vista, so the numbers I have are limited. It's best to take them as ballpark performance figures.
The tests were performed using and Intel D975XBX2 motherboard, 2GB of Crucial Ballistix DDR2 memory clocked at 800MHz, a Western Digital Raptor X hard drive and an AMD ATI Radeon X1900 XTX graphics card.
Looking at the numbers below, you'll quickly see where the QX6700 excels and where it doesn't. Any multi-threaded application completes tasks more quickly on the four-core chip than the two-core one. The biggest improvements came from CineBench 9.5, although POV-Ray showed quite big gains as well.
Rather disappointingly SYSMark04 SE didn't seem to take much advantage of the four cores, although the 2D creation test showed a significant improvement. It seems that SYSMark is still very reliant on clock speeds. PCMark 2005 showed a slight increase in the CPU score, and one that was higher under Windows Vista RC1 than Windows XP, but it wasn't a huge leap.
3DMark06 also gained some performance, although this would be due to the fact that two of the tests are doing CPU rendering, at which the quad-core chip should outperform a dual-core CPU. However, in the other 3D benchmarks the X6800 takes the lead, although with higher resolutions and filtering enabled, the gap closes quickly as the extra two cores begin to compensate for the chip's lower clock speed.
Next page: Benchmark results
COMMENTS
Power Consumption
I remember there was a problem with the power consumption in the original preview, but i didn't see a mention of it in this one, does that mean that they have sorted it out?
What about Virtualisation?
Hey there -
Something that seems to have been overlooked is how cool these CPUs should be for virtulisation workloads.
Of course, I'm assuming that these CPU's support the Intel Virtualisation technology...
Consider a Xen environment with 3 or 4 DomU's.
mmm... Fast virtualised boxes...
Maybe you should start including some virtulisation benchmarks in your reviews? :)
Xen with hardware virtualisation support is getting closer and closer and once it is available for Solaris as a Dom0, I'll certainly be getting something with 4 cores. :)
At least they have the potential to be very cool. (Tech cool - Not physically).
I'll certainly consider something like this at home when the price cools off a little... (though I'd more likely wait for the 4 core with single shared cache jobbie...)
