Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 - Yorkfield Has Landed

Name: Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 - Yorkfield Has Landed - Page 9
Brand: Intel

by Marco Chiappetta — Sunday, October 28, 2007, 11:00 AM EDT

For our last set of tests, we moved on to some in-game benchmarking with Quake 4 and F.E.A.R. When testing processors and motherboards with Q4 or F.E.A.R, we drop the screen resolution and reduce all of the in-game graphical options to their minimum values, to isolate CPU and memory performance as much as possible. However, the in-game effects and the level of detail for processing workloads such as physics calculations and particle systems, are left at their maximum values, since these actually do place some load on the CPU rather than GPU.

Benchmarks with Quake 4 and F.E.A.R. v1.08

DirectX 9 and OpenGL Gaming Performance

The same performance trend we've seen on the previous pages held true in our in-game tests. Here, the new Core 2 Extreme QX9650 was 9.1 frames per second faster than the similarly clocked Core 2 Extreme QX6850 in our custom Quake 4 benchmark and 2 frames per second faster in the F.E.A.R. benchmark. The F.E.A.R. result is essentially a wash, but the Quake 4 test shows the QX9650 with a 5.4% advantage.

Tags: Intel, Core 2, Core, LAN, Yorkfield, Xtreme, extreme, XT, IE, eme, QX, and, K

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com