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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Pirks - Wednesday, July 18, 2007 - link
again, you're probably right if the silent PC is build with dual core CPU. in my case I've got single core CPU since I don't need any dual core functionality (I mostly play games like Doom 3 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.), and while dual cores from intel are very solid choice for silent PC - single cores from Intel pretty much suck. hence my choice of AMD San Diego single core chip - that chip turned out to be the best "price/performance/watt for gaming" ratio I could find on ebay :) again, this is all about single core CPUs. I have no idea how the picture looks for dualcores, probably Intel got stronger offer here - by the time I'm about to upgrade to dual core Phenom would be around and we'll see again who wins - AMD very often wins by better price, even when their CPUs are slightly inferior to Intel onesutube545 - Thursday, July 19, 2007 - link
Oh, STFU already, you dumb fanboyPirks - Thursday, July 19, 2007 - link
what, you forgot to put some lube on your blue intel dildo again?Zak - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
Looks like the Core 2 Duo E6850 (3.00GHz) is a decent pick for gaming machine until games take full advantage of quad-core CPU.Z.
jay401 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
Or if you're a budget-conscious gamer, pick up an E4400 for less than half the price and run it at 3.0GHz/1333fsb (drop the multiplier to 9x) which seems to be a pretty common and easy oc with any motherboard capable of 1333fsb.Should show little or no performance difference considering the only hardware difference is it has half the cache which doesn't seem to impact games much if at all.
sprockkets - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
Yep, you want a nice fast platform, get Intel. But I've tested power usage of my Abit nview + 3800+ dual core 65nm processor from AMD, and it takes around 115 watts of energy at full load.I think nowadays either you get an ATX gaming system or now try to build the smallest and quietest and coolest mini itx system since they are powerful enough now for most.
bobbyto34 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
Yeah for normal home usage, it is interessant to find the best power consumption/ price / performance Ratio.AMD X23800+ @ 65€ was an excellent bargain (good performances ingame, though not as good as C2D).
In some cases, you want only raw performance: usually for work, less time spent waiting, gives you more productivity. At work we have to treat 1gigabyte text files, so the E6700 rocks vs other stations we have (A64 3000+ or P4 3.2Ghz) !
kataras - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
Hello, just wanted to know is this the Core 2 Duo CPU which has no IHS (internal heatsink) on. Was it hard to remove it, do you need special tools? Did it decrease the temp significantly? I am asking this because i am thinking of either removing IHS or lapping my E6320 as it runs really hot indeed. i would be very pleased if you could answer my questions regarding IHS.Thanks
Ron
AMDfreak - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
You can find lots of info about removing the IHS over a the xtremesystems.org forums.microAmp - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
"... whole 7MHz faster than its predecessor may..." on page 2. Should be 70Mhz faster.