Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Performance Preview January 07, 2007 Brandon Sandman Bell

Introduction

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We’re going to start by answering the latter question first: “is the market even ready for quad-core processing?” As of today, that’s a pretty easy question to answer: no. Clearly when it comes to gaming, there’s no real flagship application out there that really takes advantage of quad-processing cores, but that’s about to change. Over the coming months we’ll see the debut of a wealth of games that are capable of pushing all four cores. There’s Gas Powered Games upcoming RTS, Supreme Commander, as well as a slew of FPS shooters, including Half-Life 2 Episode 2, Unreal Tournament 2007, and Crysis, not to mention the shooter everyone’s been talking about lately, Alan Wake, although it’s doubtful that particular title will ship in 2007.

AMD and Intel have counted around 20 games that will ship in 2007 with quad-processing support. That’s a pretty high number considering that even today, there are probably fewer than 10 titles that truly take advantage of dual-core processing, and dual-core processors have been on the market since 2005. A large part of the reason why the game development industry is finally catching up to the hardware is because AMD and Intel have been working with game developers in advance this time around to incorporate multi-threading support into their games. It also doesn’t hurt that game consoles are multi-core as well. This further gives game developers added incentive to take the time out to properly code their games so that they take advantage of multiple processing cores. Audio/video encoding is another usage scenario that’s going increasingly multi-core, as well as other content creation/creativity apps such as Adboe Premiere Pro 3.0 and Pinnacle Studio 10 and 3D rendering programs like 3D Studio Max 8/9.

So now that we’ve made the case for quad-core processing on the software-side, what about the new CPU itself? Let’s take a look at the new processor…

New CPU, same core

Intel’s latest quad-core processor is based on the same Kentsfield processing core first used by Intel in the Core 2 Extreme QX6700. If you recall, with Kentsfield Intel simply crams two dual-core processor dies into one package. The two dies are then linked to the system chipset via the FSB.

In the case of the Core 2 Quad Q6600, as the “6600” designation in its name implies Intel merely combines two Core 2 Duo E6600s into one package. This means that the CPU runs at 2.4GHz with a 1066MHz FSB, and a total of 8MB L2 cache (2x4MB combined).

Since the two dies are independent of each other, they cannot share data internally; instead they communicate along the slower CPU bus, and share the same memory interface. On paper this isn’t as elegant as a native quad-core design, but in reality today’s apps aren’t capable of pushing these bottlenecks found in Intel’s Kentsfield architecture and performance scales well under the right conditions – in our multi-tasked gaming scenarios for instance we’ve found that Intel’s quad-core QX6700 CPU often ran over twice as fast as the Core 2 Duo E6700 it’s based on, and even delivered double the performance of a Core 2 Extreme X6800 in multiple tests.

With the slower clock speed, Intel is able to reduce the processor’s operating voltage from 1.35V in the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 to just 1.325V in the Core 2 Quad Q6600; this reduces thermal design power to just 105W (from 130W in the QX6700). With lower power requirements, this should help the CPU run in a wider variety of configurations -- we wouldn’t be surprised to see home theater PCs based around the Q6600 at some point.

Pricing

As of today, Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q6600 carries a list price of $851. Keep in mind this is the price Intel charges its distributors in quantities of 1,000, and not the same as the CPU’s street price, which can ultimately prove to be higher or lower. At a price of $851, the Q6600 is priced just $148 lower than the Core 2 Extreme QX6700, which runs over 200MHz faster and also features an unlocked clock multiplier. Because of this, you can make an argument that the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 is the better value, at least right now. It has been widely speculated that Intel will slash prices on the Core 2 Quad Q6600 next quarter; many reports have the CPU selling for as low as $530 as a result of these price cuts. At that price, going to quad-core will likely be a very tempting upgrade for a lot of folks, at the same time however it has also been reported that Intel will be slashing prices on the rest of their Core 2 Duo lineup as well, with today’s E6600 selling for just $224.

In any case, this is something you may want to keep in mind if you plan on upgrading in the near future.

System Setup

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System Setup

AMD Athlon 64 FX-74
AMD Athlon 64 FX-70

Intel Core 2 Extreme Edition X6800
Intel Core 2 Extreme Edition QX6700
Intel Core 2 Extreme Edition QX6700@2.4GHz
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600

EVGA nForce 680i SLI motherboard
ASUS L1N64-SLI WS nForce 680a SLI motherboard

4GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C3

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX with ForceWare 97.02

Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2

DirectX 9.0c

Benchmarks

LAME MT MP3 Encoding (MS Compiler)
Windows Media Encoder 9
3DMark06
F.E.A.R. 1.08
Quake 4 1.2
Company of Heroes 1.3
Half-Life 2 Lost Coast
Cinebench 9.5

Notes

For the Core 2 Quad Q6600 launch Intel isn’t providing CPU samples of the processor itself to press in advance, so we’re forced to lower the multiplier on our Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processor instead in order to obtain our benchmark results for this article. Performance between this underclocked QX6700 running at 2.4GHz and the real deal should be pretty similar, although obviously we can’t provide any indication on how well the CPU overclocks, as we don’t have a real sample to test with.

In any case, on to the benchmarks!

Media encoding and rendering

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Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9

LAME MT MP3 Encoding

Cinebench 9.5

Notes

Of the tests we ran here, Cinebench 9.5 clearly demonstrates the advantages of quad-core computing best. The four-core systems, including AMD’s 4x4 platform, all demonstrate a notable performance advantage over the dual-core Core 2 CPUs, with the Core 2 Quad Q6600 delivering over 1.5 times the performance of the dual-core E6600 CPU. Windows Media Encoder 9 also shows a slight performance advantage for the quad-core CPUs, although here the difference isn’t as substantial, with the Q6600 encoding a 200MB 720p HD video five seconds faster than the E6600 processor. With a larger file however the difference between the two CPUs would be notably greater.

LAME MT doesn’t appear to take advantage of multi-threading.

3DMark 06

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Futuremark 3DMark05

Notes

FutureMark’s 3DMark 06 is one synthetic benchmark that does takes advantage of multi-core. The Core 2 Quad Q6600 nearly outperforms AMD’s FX-74 in 3DMark’s CPU test, and generates a score within 12% of the QX6700.

Valve Multi-core benchmark

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Notes

Valve is one of many game developers that plans to incorporate support for multi-core in their latest games. In fact, multi-core optimizations will be incorporated into the next Source engine update just ahead of Half-Life 2 Episode 2.

Before this occurs though Valve has created a set of benchmark applications that are designed to take advantage of multi-threading. The test above, Valve’s particle sim benchmark, runs a series of particle simulations inside the Source engine entirely on the CPU. In one scene, rain is falling heavily in an empty room. The rain drops splash on the ground, which is covered in water.

The benchmark spits out a score based on how quickly the CPU is able to render the scene, with higher scores indicating better performance.

As you can see, Intel’s Core 2 processors deliver better performance in this benchmark, with both quad-core CPUs outperforming AMD’s 4x4 platform. If you’re a big fan of Valve’s titles, you may want to keep this in mind if you plan on upgrading soon, as quad-core support is just around the corner.

F.E.A.R.

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F.E.A.R.

Notes

For our gaming tests, we’re running a mixture of high and low-res testing. We realize that most of you don’t game at 800x600, which is the ideal res to test CPUs, so we also include results at 1600x1200 with 4xAA/8xAF, which are graphics settings more typical of someone with a GeForce 8800 GTX card. Also keep in mind that as we stated at the outset, most games don’t take advantage of dual-core processing, much less quad-core, so for the most part, the additional processing cores found in Intel’s latest processors sit around idling during single-tasked gaming sessions. That’s why towards the end we’ve included multi-tasked gaming benchmarks.

In the low resolution tests that stress CPU performance, the Core 2 Extreme X6800 comes out on top, with the Core 2 QX6700 trailing by 3% and the Q6600 by 12%. Again, it performs just like a regular Core 2 Duo E6600.

As you increase screen resolution, the bottleneck shifts to the graphics card and by 1600x1200 we’re GPU-bound and all the systems deliver similar performance.

Quake 4

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Quake 4

Notes

As far as we know, id has no plans to update the Doom 3 engine used in Quake 4/Prey to take advantage of multi-threading; Enemy Territory: Quake Wars isn’t listed as a game that will push today’s latest quad-core solutions. In any case, as you can see, the Core 2 Quad Q6600 performs just like the E6600 in this benchmark.

HL2 Lost Coast

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Lost Coast

Company of Heroes

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Company of Heroes

Multi-tasked Gaming – FEAR

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F.E.A.R.

Notes

Under our multi-tasked gaming scenarios we run our MP3 and WME9 encoding tests in the background while also gaming. This puts an enormous burden on the CPU, particularly at lower resolutions, and thus performance drops significantly for the dual-core CPUs and the quad-core CPUs really begin to shine. Under this scenario in F.E.A.R. the Q6600 delivered nearly double the performance of its dual-core sibling the E6600 at 800x600. Under the greater demands of 1600x1200 with 4xAA/8xAF however the graphics card begins to bottleneck the quad-core CPUs even under this usage scenario and the margin separating the two CPUs narrows to just 17%.

Multi-tasked Gaming – Quake 4

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Quake 4

Conclusion

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Yes and no.

Hardware-wise, Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q6600 is primed for success. Because Intel’s quad-core processors are compatible with most of the Core 2-compliant 975X and P965 motherboards already on the market, the hardware infrastructure is already in place for the Core 2 Quad Q6600, it’s practically a drop-in replacement for most folks who already own one of these motherboards. All you’ll likely need is a BIOS update for Q6600 support. The processor itself is also a terrific performer, outpacing AMD’s 3.0GHz FX-74 4x4 system in many of our tests, although keep in mind that in apps that don’t take advantage of multi-threading (read: games), it performs similarly to a Core 2 Duo E6600.

The biggest obstacle that the Core 2 Quad Q6600 will have to overcome, at least in the short term, is pricing. As of right now, the CPU carries an $851 price tag. As we mentioned in the intro, that’s an awfully expensive price considering that for less than $150 more, you can get a Core 2 Extreme QX6700 which runs over 200MHz faster and more importantly, has an unlocked clock multiplier, allowing you to OC the CPU to your hearts content provided you’ve got the right motherboard.

The bottom line is that as it stands today, the Core 2 Quad Q6600 is priced too close to the Core 2 Extreme to really be a good value.

All this is expected to change in Q2’07 however, when it’s rumored that the Q6600 will sell for under $550. At that price point, the Q6600 would be a much more enticing upgrade, and as such, that’s the time we’d suggest you pick up a Q6600 if quad-core interests you, but you can’t afford to drop $1K on a new processor.