Four cores are better than two

AFTER PLAYING second fiddle to AMD in the enthusiast market for some years, Chipzilla came crushing down on the upstart this year. And, so far, AMD has still to respond to any of the technological and product advancements that Chipzilla is offering.

Intel's Core 2 marchitecture pretty much captured hearts of IT enthusiasts world-wide. We were impressed with the amount of performance and overclockability that Conroe offered us from day one.

While folks at DAAMIT will claim that Kentsfield is not a true quad-core, we feel that approach is pretty daft, since AMD will be following suit in a couple of weeks time. AMD will also use two dies to get quad., but each die is placed on one Opteron socket - and you need a new motherboard and so on and so on... Intel just uses Core Multiplexing tech to get the two dies working on the same substrate and sharing a system bus.

The QC6700 Intel is introducing today is actually two Core 2 Extreme X6800 dies placed on a single substrate, and clocked at E6700 speeds. So, Intel did not put two E6700s together. Rather its cherry-picked, X6800-worthy dies are spliced together "for as long as they shalt live", with the clock reduced by one multiplier step.

Intel is also keeping the X6800 in production, so if you have a spare 1000 dollars/euros - you can choose between higher clocked single-Conroe die or two of them stacked on the same space.

For those 1000 dollars/euros, you are getting about 582 million of transistors, 8MB of L2 cache split between two dies, 1066MHz FSB and a clock of 2.66GHz. Or you can take half of transistors and cache, same FSB and 266MHz faster clock. For me, it's a no brainer, really.

Bear in mind that QC6700 is not available on the market right now, since the availability date is set for November 14th, the same day as AMD will hard-launch its $x$ concept in the form of dual FX-70, FX-72 and FX-74 packages.

Do you need a QuadCore?
When it comes to the question, is quad-core worth it? You should consider whether you are buying your CPU for today or for tomorrow.

I ran Athlon 64 X2 4800+ the day it appeared on the market and I never looked back. It was impressive to see all those Windows background services running off one core, and other being the 100 per cent dedicated to a game (probably the very first time a game engine saw the CPU core only for itself). Same thing is with this Kentsfield right now - with dual and multi-threaded games appearing on the market, with CPU-bound hardware (the difference in running 8800GTX on dual- and quad-core is more than tangible) appearing on shelves, you can pretty much feel which way the wind blows. Crysis and Alan Wake will be key titles for quad-core adoption, and they will use the CPU for physics calculation.

The review kit
The box from Intel came with Intel Confidential processor placed on D975XBX2 motherboard, a king-size CPU cooler with a grill and a plethora of flyers that explain what will quad-core do for you.

There were also ads for DAAMIT's CrossFire and Graphzilla's nForce 680i. The flyers were telling you that you are stupid if you don't use those products to review this monster, so we decided to give it a go and fired off some e-mails.

We had tried to get either nForce 680i or RD600 board for a review, but we heard no response from either company until late last week, when it was too late for us to include those products in this INQpression. If any of the companies or partners wants to see its product reviewed with this CPU, just send us an e-mail.

So, we have used the very same motherboard model most of the reviews feature: Intel D975XBX2, or plain old "Bad Axe 2".

The board was launched earlier in the year, with Conroe. It features several BIOS fixes, a revised layout, and you should not have "mission impossible" if you want to run DDR2 at 800 MHz clock. Our board had an irritating bug that it would shut down if Ctrl+Alt+Del were pressed during POST, but other than that, it worked just fine.

The CPU itself was marked "Confidential" and did not differ from any engineering sample we have seen. We tried to power the machine using a cooler from Intel, but the noise was unbearable, even worse than ill-fated FXFlow (I really did not expect to write this. Ever).

The clock speed was set at 2.66GHz, but this is not the only clock this CPU works on. This is the first Extreme Edition CPU in a while that supports power-saving features, so when you enable EIST (SpeedStep), the CPU clock will be set at 1.6GHz at idle. Load the CPU and voila - all of the 2.66GHz will be at your disposal.

Benchmarks
In this first review we will be focusing on performance of Kentsfield under Windows XP. However, we are currently testing the system with Windows Vista, Flight Simulator X and next-generation DirectX 10 hardware in order to get the performance matrix with DX10 application.

In order to assess the performance of Kentsfield, we've paired it against Core 2 Extreme X6800 and Athlon 64 FX-62. Right now, these are only CPUs you should be watching, but for the DX10 review we will be showing you the performance of slower Athlon 64 X2 and NetBurst CPUs.

Intel Test configuration was consisted out of following:
Asetek VapoChill Micro cooler
Intel D975XBX2 motherboard
2GB GeIL PC-8500 MultiSpec Kit
Nvidia GeForce 7950GX2 2x512MB GDDR3
250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.8
Samsung SATA DVD burner
580W Tagan EasyCon PSU
Logitech G15 Keyboard
Logitech MX-510 Mouse

For the AMD configuration, the only changes were the motherboard (Foxconn nForce 590SLI). The systems were running of a 64GB C: partition with 160GB secondary partition. All of the tests were installed on the D: drive. Installed software includes Windows XP Professional SP2, Office 2003 Professional, and benchmark software. Installed drivers were DirectX 9.0c October 2006 Update, ForceWare 91.47 drivers and Intel CSIU 2214.

When explaining benchmark scores, we can tell you that at default clocks, there is a small disadvantage with Kentsfield has with 266MHz less clock than X6800. Athlon 64 FX-62 takes a significant beating from Kentsfield as well, so it is no wonder that AMD is rushing out with QuadFather or "$x$" concept once Kentie will hit the streets. Most of the software just isn't optimised for more than two threads, or two cores - so a performance advantage over Athlon 64 or X6800 just wasn't there.

In 3DMark05, we have seen even a performance degrade over E6700, which surprised us. 3DMark06 showed improvement in both general and CPU indexes, because the CPU test offers support for multi-core processors. PCMark05 however, didn't offer multi-core optimisation and Kentie lost easily to Conroe.

On the more professional side, Cinebench 9.5 showed bloody great performance improvements, so users of Cinema 4D should embrace the Kenties.

When it comes to manipulating audio and video files, we encoded our test video file in Dr. DivX 1.0.6. and audio was tested with modified LAME 3.97a. Dr. DivX got its kicks from X6800, and same happened with LAME.

In games, we saw the performance marginally shaded on the side of Conroe X6800, which has that clock speed advantage. However, a friend reported that he experienced a 15 per cent performance increase in Call of Duty 2. We went out, bought the game, installed the latest patch and ran some manual runs. In each and every run, we saw a clear performance increase over E6700, and the performance was enough to edge out X6800. Seeing as Call of Duty 2 is made primary for Xbox 360, there may be just some secret connection.

Overclocking
We have told you that Kentsfield sports two X6800 cores, so we were wondering if you can achieve the same clock on each - and the answer is yes. In fact, we managed to get a 100 per cent stable clock speed working at 3.2GHz (12x266) at stock voltage! While the temperature rose significantly and broke into the 70s, we had no worries - Intel's FXFlow copycat ran our CPU in high 80s and mid 90s under 100 per cent load, so there is still some performance to be extracted.

When running at 3.2GHz, all of the scores just obliterate and there is not a single product on the market that comes close to the performance shown here. This includes the WoodCrest hidden inside a Mac Pro. In fact, it's sad that Apple went with Xeon platform, because now we feel there would be many Apple-lovers out there buying this Extreme product.

First conclusion
If you have money to burn, between equally priced Conroe (X6800) and Dual Conroe (QC6700) there is no doubt. If you want highest performance, just overclock the QC6700 to X6800 levels and you have simply a great CPU platform until mini-cores start popping up.

However, I would still advise you to wait not to buy QX6700 today. Wait for two weeks before shopping for it. Graphzilla will officially unveil the 680i chipset on the 8th, and our partners are telling us this is the best chipset for Intel. And in 12 days time, AMD will launch its 4x4 platform. Wait until then and make the call after seeing all of the scores.

If 1000 dollars/euros for the CPU seems brutally expensive, I will be the first to tell you that I agree with you. But this product announces what tomorrow will bring to you, in the likes of Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.40GHz) and Q6400 (2.13GHz). FX-70 and FX-72 will be also more affordable than 1000 dollar/euro bound FX-74, so just sit back, see who will give the most for your money and just jump on for the ride. If you consider yourself enthusiast or a professional, there really isn't any dilemma. If you want to be future-proof for at least two years, this is the ticket to ride.

But QC6700 running at 3.2GHz just made me one happy camper. Yes, all of these games use multi-threading, and will squeeze your quaddie. ?

This was Theo's First INQpression of Intel's QuadCore. Charlie will post his take later, while Theo's second Inqpression is coming after the G80 embargo date, with DX10 benchmarks.