Intel Core2 QX9770 

Legit Bottom Line: The Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor QX9770 offers a 1600MHz FSB and a 200MHz higher overall clock speed over the previous flagship processor from Intel.

When it came to overclocking the Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor QX9770 was marvelous.

The 3.2GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Black Edition processor was just a single second behind the 2.66GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 processor, which goes to show MHz isn't everything!

With 1.5Vcore on the processor, the system was able to top out at 4.51GHz with partial stability.

The Intel QX9770 has a 3.2 GHz core frequency (an increase of 200MHz), a 12MB chunk of L2 cache, and was built on the 45nm process and features a new SSE4 instruction set.

Processor Performance on Pov-Ray 3.7 Beta 23:The Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer was developed from DKBTrace 2.12 (written by David K. Buck and Aaron A. Collins) by a bunch of people (called the POV-Team) in their spare time.

Benchmark Results: With the graphics settings moved down to low, the bulk of the strain is on the processor, which is what you want for a CPU benchmark.

Sisoft Sandra XII benchmark utility just came out a couple months ago and we have started to include it in out benchmarking.

Results: World in Conflict had a new patch come out a couple weeks ago and we were able to benchmark the latest patch (002) on the latest and greatest processors from both AMD and Intel to show you what performance will be like.

It just goes to show that Intel has spent a lot of time with Yorkfield making sure it is energy efficient and that the core doesn't leak.

In fact, we will be testing the very three processors pictured above (Intel QX6950/QX9770, QX6850 and E6750) along with the AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ to see how the new Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor QX9770 processor does against other high-end offerings from AMD and Intel on Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit.

By showing off the Core 2 Extreme Processor QX9770 performance numbers early it means that many of the review sites will include these numbers to go along with the Phenom processor model 9900 (2.6GHz) as it too won't be out till next year.

On machines that have multiple CPUs or CPU cores, and also on those who simulate multiple CPUs (via HyperThreading or similar technolgies), MAXON CINEBENCH will run a second test using all available CPU power.

The Intel QX9770, with it's faster FSB and higher clock speeds, was able to shave another three seconds off the benchmark and is almost able to complete it in a minute flat.

Since 2K didn't include a benchmark script or utility in BIOSHOCK I used FRAPS version 2.9.2 to capture the frame rates for 240 seconds at scenes that I personally selected from the game.