Intel Kentsfield trounces AMD Quad FX

THE LAUNCH OF THE QUAD FX is imminent, and the first benchmarks are starting to appear on-line. Our Japanese colleagues at PC Watch managed to score a world exclusive and file the very first review of the Quad FX, in its fastest iteration, the FX-74.

First of all, older versions of CPU-Z recognise this product as "Opteron 8130 EE", which means this product is recognised as Opteron for Socket AM2, but placed on Socket 1207.

The testing was conducted on ASUS L1N64-SLI WS (workstation) motherboard, not on the Deluxe product that Nvidia advertised at first. CPUs were clocked at 3.02GHz, while Corsair Dominator memory worked at 754MHz, due to divider issues.

Test scores reveal that Quad FX manages to achieve equal performance to Core 2 Extreme QX6700 in SiSoft Sandra 2007 and PCMark05 and narrowly edged it in memory tests: both L1, L2 and system memory latency are better on QuadFX than on Kentsfield, but that's nothing new.

However, taking a look into media encoding shows that QuadFather just gets crushed by Kentsfield, especially in MPEG-2 8Mbit reproduction. But the worst result for AMD is a look into power consumption and performance per watt. AMD system consumes far more power than Intel, sometimes even double that Kentsfield setup.

In the end, price is the real winner here. You can buy AMDs "quad-core" package for 599 dollars (FX-70, 2.6GHz part), and two FX-74 CPUs will set you back by 1000 dollars or euros. Even if you don't like to shell out hefty sums of money for the CPUs, no one can oppose the fact that you can now buy quad-core parts at same price of dual cores from yesterday. µ

More about the QuadFX and how it faired against native, dual-die single-packaged Core 2 processor can be found here. µ