Introduction:
Intel has enjoyed a healthy lead over its AMD competitor for a stretch now that would make it appear as if they were THE Quad chip of choice. With the launch of Phenom Quad counter-part from AMD, the industry under dog had hoped it would be able to steal the limelight based on price for at least a small window, but the chip giant had other plans to squash AMD’s strategy. Intel not willing to budge out of the spotlight, unveiled its next gen Quad Core .45 line with the flagship introduction of the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770.
Following the media frenzy that had encompassed the press launch of the QX9770, reports began to funnel in describing unheard of overclocking capabilities of the 3.2GHz part. Review labs across the world were reporting in overclocks of north of 4GHz and 25%, while the black box Phenom’s were stuck at a challenging 10% overclock. While 10% is nothing to balk it, it was clear that Intel had executed a shrewd strategy to capture the attention of gamers and performance addicts alike. The only question now is could it capture their wallets as its estimated price in March of >$1000 MSRP is almost three times that of the AMD counterpart and will be a bit hard to swallow for the frugal gamer.
We recently received one of the industry’s most sought after offerings, the QX9770, at our test location and it would seem Intel has good reason to smile as our results will illuminate. You’ll need a motherboard with 1600 MHz FSB support which will limit you to the other an overclocked Intel X38 chipset or the newly introduced Intel X48 chipset with native support for the 1600MHz front side bus. Having to upgrade your mainboard and in some cases your memory to the very pricey DDR3 may prove an obstacle for early adopters, but many will find the resulting performance too much of a magnet to resist.
System Specs:
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770
- Memory: Corsair 1600MHz 4GB DDR3
- Hard Drives: 4x150GB WD Raptor 10K RPM in Raid 0
- Motherboard: Intel X38 Chipset
- Operating System: Windows XP SP3
- Video Drivers: Catalyst Drivers 7.12
3D Rendering Performance:
Cinebench R10
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Cinebench R10 shows the highest score we’ve ever measured, the score quadrupling with all 4 threads of the core in use. Compared to its closest competitor the Core 2 Quad QX9650, performance has increased by 3% most likely because of the QX9770’s higher clock speed.
Pov-ray 3.7 RTR
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Ray-tracing also benefits greatly from quad core with the cpu scaling to 4 times the performance compared to single core. We ran the built-in Pov-ray benchmark and recorded the results. The QX9770 does not disappoint, giving us the highest Pov-ray score we’ve ever measured. If you do any type of 3d Rendering this is the processor to get!
Multimedia Performance:
TechArp X264 Benchmark
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Here we encoded DVD quality Mpeg-2 video to x264 and measure the average fps after 5 runs. In this benchmark the QX9770 proves why its Intel’s flagship processor giving us the fastest encode we’ve measured with 175 fps on pass 1 and 46 fps on pass 2. You can certainly see why multimedia editors or even regular users will benefit tremendously from the QX9770.
