Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800

For our next round of synthetic benchmarks, we ran the CPU and memory performance modules built into Futuremark's PCMark05 suite. 

Futuremark PCMark05 More Synthetic CPU and Memory Benchmarks

"The CPU test suite is a collection of tests that are run to isolate the performance of the CPU. The CPU Test Suite also includes multithreading: two of the test scenarios are run multithreaded; the other including two simultaneous tests and the other running four tests simultaneously. The remaining six tests are run single threaded. Operations include, File Compression/Decompression, Encryption/Decryption, Image Decompression, and Audio Compression" - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.

Thanks to its four cores and high frequency, the Core 2 Extreme QX6800 finished at the head of the pack in PCMark05's CPU performance module. In a synthetic, multi-threaded benchmark like this, that can fully exploit the processor's capabilities, being the highest clocked quad-core Core 2 processor, makes it the fastest CPU here by a significant margin.

"The Memory test suite is a collection of tests that isolate the performance of the memory subsystem. The memory subsystem consists of various devices on the PC. This includes the main memory, the CPU internal cache (known as the L1 cache) and the external cache (known as the L2 cache). As it is difficult to find applications that only stress the memory, we explicitly developed a set of tests geared for this purpose. The tests are written in C++ and assembly. They include: Reading data blocks from memory, Writing data blocks to memory performing copy operations on data blocks, random access to data items and latency testing."  - Courtesy FutureMark Corp.

Our Core 2 Extreme QX6800 powered test bed finished just just in front of the QX6700 in PCMark05's Memory Performance module, but the delta separating the two processors is relatively small. Because the memory controller resides in the chipset's northbridge, and the QX6800 and QX6700 utilize the same chipset here and have the same FSB and memory frequencies, you can expect them to put up similar scores in memory related benchmarks.