System Setup

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!