QX6850 CPU Performance Preview

Introduction:
Here we are again with another CPU from Intel, this time it is the QX6850. The 1333MHz FSB, 3.0GHz flavor of Intel’s Quad-Core CPU. This CPU comes even as rumors and pictures of AMD’s quad core are showing up on the net. Still no silicon in the tech-press’ hands though. Intel seems to be running circles around AMD in the performance market and has released the xx50 series as a speed bump in the road map to faster CPUs. But what, if anything, is different with the QX6850 besides the FSB speed and the overall CPU speed? We are going to take a look at some of the performance you should expect from the QX6850 when compared to the Quad-Core CPUs currently available (strangely only from Intel).

 
Product: Core Extreme Quad QX6850
Author: Sean Kalinich
Category: Enthusiast
Reviewed on: July 16th 2007
Product cost: TBA
Manufacturer: Intel
Spelling and Grammatical editor:  Carlos Echenique, Paul Mercer

Performance:
Although this is not a full blown review of the QX6850 (just like the E6750 that will have to come later) we still wanted to give you a good look into what the QX6850 can do.  I tested this against the QX6700 both CPUs running at stock speeds. I did not include an AMD CPU as I have not been able t get a quad-core sample from them for comparison. Again, as with the E6750 CPU preview, I broke the testing into two parts. Synthetic and Real-World gaming.

The results of my testing are listed below.
The test system was:

Synthetics:
Ah synthetic testing, always a source of controversy and bickering. Is a synthetic test a real gauge of what a system can do? I personally say no, as synthetic tests can be fooled by certain optimizations in drivers (anyone remember the quake III testing fiasco?) and they really do not take the whole system into account. I do include them as they can be a good reference point to how a system should run with similar hardware to the test system. My tests of choice are below.

Bear in mind as you look at these numbers. The QX6850 not only has a faster FSB but a fast clock speed. I did not want to get into over clocking the QX6700 to match the speed as overclocking a CPU for testing leads to other errors in comparison.

3DMark06

Although 3DMatk06 is aimed at gaming performance it does have a fairly good test of CPU performance on a game level. The average gain for the overall test was only 4.5% while the average CPU test gain was 21.71%.

PCMark05

PCMark05 also shows an over all improvement, this time it is 18.53%. I am still not convinced that this is not just the improvement in overall speed (2.66GHz vs 3.0GHz).

POVRay 3.7 Beta

POVRay 3.7 Beta is a fairly new test but has shown itself to be an honest representation of CPU based rendering. Here the performance seems to be more than just the jump to 3.0GHz. The improvement is a nice 21.26%

CineBench 9.5

Cinebench 9.5 is another render test, although they have more than just CPU based test. CineBench has both single and multi-core tests. Here the single core improvement is 20.99% and Multi-Core is 19.60%. This shows some of the overhead associated with multiple cores, although the actual render scores show more plainly the benefits of Multi-Core.

Video Encoding:

Now here is something interesting, at first I thought I had made a mistake. I ran the test over and over and the results were the same. It seems that the QX6700 is simply faster at Dixv encoding when using AutoGK.

SuperPi Mod:
QX6700 Multi-Core 32M Run (With Core Affinity)

QX6700 Single 32M Run

QX6700 Multi-Core 32M Run (Without Core Affinity)

QX6850 Multi-Core 32M Run (With Core Affinity)

QX6850 Single 32M Run

QX6850 Multi-Core 32M Run (Without Core Affinity)

All times in Minutes and Seconds 

QX6700 Multi-Core 1M Run (With Core Affinity)

QX6700 Single 1M Run

QX6700 Multi-Core 1M Run (Without Core Affinity)

QX6850 Multi-Core 1M Run (With Core Affinity)

QX6850 Single 1M Run

QX6850 Multi-Core 1M Run (Without Core Affinity)

Time in Seconds

Gaming:
It has long been known that, for gaming, the CPU plays very little into performance at high resolutions. That is why for all of my testing here I used a relatively low resolution. 1024×768. I turned off all of the eye candy as well. This will show the performance differences in how the CPU handles AI, CPU based physics, and other items that do not involve the GPU.  Again bear in mind the clock and FSB speed differences between the two CPUs used in the comparison.

Need for Speed Carbon:

With Need for Speed Carbon we see a performance gain, but again this is more than likely due to the actual CPU speed vs the FSB speed.

F.E.A.R.

F.E.A.R. shows no performance gain or loss.

Again no gain or loss worth noting.

HalfLife 2 Episode 1

Once more we see no gain or loss.

Conclusion:
So as we saw in the preview of the E6750 there is not much of an improvement over the E6700, but the QX6850 with the faster FSB and clock speed is an improvement over the currently available quad. This CPU now sits with the Multi-tasking performance crown squarely on its head. I hope that AMD can get back into the game and at least offer some competition for this CPU, but as AMD has always chosen the tight-lipped approach on new products we will not know until they are released. But with the market the way it is, many people will not want to jump ship on a new and untested CPU when they have a known power house they can pickup. Adding to this threat is the fact that Intel will have its very own native Quad-Core coming out soon and if the performance of the current non-native Quad-Core CPUs are any gauge they will be very fast indeed.

Acknowledgments:
Thanks goes out to Dan Snyder at Intel for the QX6850 (and the QX6700) used in this evaluation.