Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor QX9650 Review  - SUPER PI and Conclusion
Bluetooth 29 Oct 2007

Pricing of Intel P35 boards >>>

SuperPI 1.5

Most users were impressed by the Super PI results when the first Core 2 Duo processor was announced. With the QX9650, the Super PI 1M score is what users use as a guide for comparing system performance.

With the QX9650, we ran the processor at default and it scored 15secs to finish the 1M SuperPI Test.

When we overclock it to 4GHz (445 x 9), it slashed down to 11 seconds. This is all done in air cool environment. I presume that with water cooling, it should be able to bring it under 10 secs.

Conclusion

In terms of raw performance, this CPU is slightly faster than a QX6700 o/c to same clock speed. This is largely due to a bigger amount of cache. When overclock is concerned, the CPU is able to overclock to 4GHz on air easily. Although we can go higher to 470Mhz x 9 or 480MHz x 9, the system is relatively unstable at those speeds. 445MHz x 9 (4GHz) seems to be the sweet spot for Air cooled environment.

Using Easytune 5, we monitor the CPU temperature at idle. It registers 33 deg Celsius. After running Cinebench 10, the temperature rises to around  45 deg Celsius. You can see from the task manager the cpu utilisation of each core during the rendering of the image using all 4 cores are at 100%.

The QX9650 extreme processor is leads the industry with it's 45nm and new SSE4 instruction set capability. We have seen the performance improvement in SSE4 enabled applications like Cinebench 10 and TMPGenc. Thus, if you are the person who goes for video encoding, editing, this processor will definitely slice down the amount of time taken to complete the job. With utmost performance levels that can't be matched by it's competitors, I am sure the QX9650 is able to do better when more applications are SSE4 enabled.

Price USD 999 for quantities of 1000.

Related Reviews 1
Related Reviews 2

(C) Copyright 1998-2009 OCWorkbench.com