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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xsilver - Wednesday, July 18, 2007 - link
One question has still yet to be answered:how far does the e6850 overclock vs how far the q6600 overclocks
from previous articles the q6600 doesnt reach much beyond 3ghz unless you have supercooling?
but the e6850?
Slash3 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
I know this is a bit after the fact, but would it be possible on the "vs" charts, to plot the negative performance improvements (read: performance loss) in a left-of-center fashion, instead of having both extending to the right of zero, with a negative sign tacked on? It makes it pretty difficult to scan visually. Go from -100 to 0 to +100 in the same X axis, and just increase the granularity a bit to fit things on, in cases where there are significant negative values. The E6850 vs Q6600 is a good example. Negative and positive, all over the place. Just friendly commentary. Excellent writeup, otherwise. :)DerekWilson - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
as was explored in a previous video artilce, we could simply add 100 to each of these and compare the bars with 100 percent meaning eqivalent performance. negatives would be less than 100 while positives would be greater than 100 ...personally, i don't mind the negaive numbers in a different color paradigm. if the readers would prefer the "centered at 100%" style, we will certainly adapt.
i don't know how the other editors here feel, but marketing guys like to show us graphs around 100% performance of something ... because of that, it just ends up feeling wrong to me. :-)
dev0lution - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
No red lines? That's a pretty impressive lineup for the prices Intel has. Looks like there might be Q6600 in my future very soon :)tuteja1986 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
where is this price cut.. i don't seem em in newegg.webdawg77 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
July 22ndDerekWilson - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
fixed the red lines issueThatguy97 - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
back then i stuck to dual core with my e6600 going all the way up to 4ghz ish speeds