Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 and Massive Price Cuts
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 16, 2007 3:04 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
The Million Dollar Question: Dual or Quad Core for the Same Price?
Before talk of Intel's July 22nd price cuts surfaced, we were hardly ever asked the question "dual or quad", simply because the price differential was so great. After next week everything changes, as you'll be able to pick up a quad-core Q6600 (2.4GHz) for a measly $266. At the same time, you could get a much higher clocked dual-core E6850 (3.0GHz) for the exact same price - so which do you pick?
This graph is a lot more colorful than our previous ones because the decision just isn't that clear. If you look at the average, quad-core gains an advantage over dual-core over all of our benchmarks, but if you look at the tests themselves you'll see some trends. Encoding and 3D manipulation benchmarks have the quad-core CPU clearly ahead, while general usage and gaming benchmarks mostly favor the higher clocked dual-core E6850. So, which do you choose?
If you're strictly building a gaming box, you'll get more performance out of the dual-core E6850. However, if you do any encoding or 3D rendering at all, the quad-core Q6600 is a better buy. Our pick is the Q6600 and if you want to make up the performance difference you can always overclock to E6850 speeds, but the chip only makes sense if you're running apps that can take advantage of four cores. As the chart above illustrates, those applications are almost exclusively limited to video encoding and 3D rendering.
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gigahertz20 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
Ahhh man I loved the article but I was hoping for some overclocking benchmarks, very disappointing. I wanted to see an overclocked Q6600 vs. overclocked e6850, there were reports the E6850 can OC up to around 4GHz. I was hoping this article would show us some OC results. Is this planned for later or something?cpeter38 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
Another Ditto!!!!Sunrise089 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
and another!All the early Conroe reviews had OC numbers. And yes, by now we realize that as far as dual-cores go, any of the new parts should overclock about the same. It's really important to a lot of users however to know how the overclocking of these new parts matches up to the quad-core part.
Frumious1 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
You've got numbers http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3020&am...">like this that have quad core hitting 3.60 GHz with appropriate cooling. Q6600 should easily hit 3.0-3.3 GHz with a reasonable HSF, and if you want something high-end like the Ultra-120 Extreme, maybe even 3.60 GHz (9x400). One more reason to go quad - just mind the energy bills!Sunrise089 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
yes, but what about if the dual-core part is overclocked to 4.0ghz?Frumious1 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
Given that overall performance goes to 2.4 GHz quad core over 3.0 GHz dual core (a 600 MHz difference), I can guarantee that a 3.6 GHz quad core would be better than 4.0 GHz dual core (a 400 MHz difference). That said, for gaming it really wouldn't matter much right now - no games even try to utilize more than two cores that I'm aware of. And don't even think about a 3.6 GHz overclocked quad core chip unless you have a beefy PSU!BikeDude - Tuesday, July 17, 2007 - link
Flight Simulator X SP1 adds multicore support and should benefit from additional (beyond dual) cores."As I stated previously, our multi-core support will take advantage of both 2 and 4 cores today, and more cores in the future when they become available."
(http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2007/05/14/f...">http://blogs.msdn.com/ptaylor/archive/2007/05/14/f...
I am a bit disappointed that Anandtech doesn't bench FSX. I also miss the compiler benchmarks they used to do. AMD used to do quite well in those... (I say this as someone who uses compilers, not as a former AMD fanboy which I probably am)
RamarC - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
anyone know what oc results i can expect with a p35-based mobo and a q6600? is 3.0ghz as easy to reach as it is with an e6600?ZDNetReader1 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
Ditto!! What he said!!MrKaz - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
Price-wise, the only AMD/Intel competition we have here is between the FX-74 and the Q6700. Do keep in mind that as the FX-74 is a dual-socket configuration, the motherboard is a bit more expensive than what you can use with any of the single-socket quad-core Intel solutions.This is obviously true, but it’s also true that Intel motherboards for single socket VS AMD motherboards for single socket are also more expensive.
In my country equivalent ASUS AMD motherboard VS ASUS INTEL motherboard is around 30% to 50% cheaper.
Do keep that in mind too.