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Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 - Quad Core goes 'Mainstream'

By Vijay Anand - 1 Feb 2007

Results - Futuremark 3DMark05 and 3DMark06

Results - Futuremark 3DMark05 and 3DMark06

3DMark05 is an example of the older generation of games that aren't optimized to handle quad-core processing. In fact, there's very little multi-threading advantage offered in 3DMark05. As a result, the outcome is pretty much reflective of the benchmark's capability where the Core 2 Quad Q6600 is ranking ahead of the Core 2 Duo E6600 processor but less than that of the E6700 model.

On the other hand, 3DMark06's CPU test is made highly threaded and can scale well with the number of processing cores. As such, it's faster than then Core 2 Duo E6600, E6700 and the Extreme X6800 processors by 71%, 54% and 41% respectively. The CPU is also actively involved in the normal graphics benchmarks for some physics and flight path calculation of the jet-packed airship rendered on screen, but when considering its influence in the big picture of a gaming application, graphics performance is still key. So the quad-core processors still maintained their lead, but not to the same extent of the solely CPU rendered benchmark. As game engines progress this and the next year, we should be able to see more of such performance scaling compared to the current outlook.

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