Intel Quad-Core Core 2 Extreme QX6700 Performance Preview
Results
Contents
You can see the performance results in the table below. Keep in mind that Core 2 Extreme X6800 runs at a higher clock rate (2.93 GHz) than Core 2 QX6700 (2,66 GHz). For DivX, Sony Vegas and 3ds Max the results are given in seconds, so the lower the better.
| Program | Core 2 Extreme X6800 | Core 2 Extreme QX6700 | Difference |
| Divx 6.2.5 with XMPEG 5.03 (seconds) | 106 | 77 | 27.35% |
| Sony Vegas 7.0a Build 115 (seconds) | 382 | 253 | 33.77% |
| 3ds Max 8 SP2 (seconds) | 80 | 49 | 38.75% |
| POV-Ray Beta 15 | 1428 | 2594 | 81.65% |
| PCMark05 Professional 1.1.0 (Overall) | 7689 | 7575 | -1.48% |
| PCMark05 Professional 1.1.0 (CPU) | 7425 | 8492 | 14.37% |
| 3DMark06 Professional 1.0.2 (Overall) | 8281 | 8910 | 7.60% |
| 3DMark06 Professional 1.0.2 (CPU) | 2508 | 3981 | 58.73% |
On the chart below you can see the performance difference between the two CPUs in percent. The chart indicates by how much Core 2 Extreme QX6700 is faster than Core 2 Extreme X6800.
As you can see the CPUs achieved similar performance on PCMark05 overall test suit. On 3DMark06 the performance difference between the two CPUs wasn’t big (7.60%), which does not surprise us at all, since 3D performance nowadays depends a lot on the video card being used. Also, keep in mind that the two CPUs run at different clock rates, Core 2 Extreme QX6700 running at 2.66 GHz while Core 2 Extreme X6800 runs at 2.93 GHz.
The performance difference on the 3DMark06 CPU test was impressive (60%), however this specific CPU performance increase does not necessarily translates into a higher 3D performance – as we mentioned, 3D performance measured by this program increased only 7.60%.
The real difference between the two CPUs is seen on programs that take advantage of symmetric multiprocessing, especially rendering. On 3ds Max the performance difference was over 60% and on POV-Ray we could see a stunning 80% performance increase. Video editing will also benefit a lot of quad-core CPUs, as Core 2 Extreme QX6700 was 50% faster than Core 2 Extreme X6800 here. Even MPEG decoding will be benefited by quad-core technology, as you can see.