Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200S and Q9550S 65W CPUs
Test Setup & SiSoft SANDRA
How We Configured Our Test Systems: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for either DDR2-1066 (AMD) with 5,5,5,15 timings or DDR3-1333 with 7,7,7,20 timings (Intel). The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows Vista Ultimate was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.
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System 1: 2x2GB Corsair PC2-8500 GeForce GTX 280 WD150 "Raptor" HD Windows Vista Ultimate |
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We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA XII, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran three of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA XII suite with the two 65W Core 2 Quads (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multimedia, Multi-Core Efficiency). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at their default clock speeds of 2.33GHz (Q8200S) and 2.83Ghz (Q9550S).
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The Q8200S and Q9550S performed as expected in the SANDRA processor arithmetic and multimedia benchmarks. Our results for both processors were right on par with SANDRA's reference numbers. The Q8200S performed identically to the standard Q8200, and the Q9550S performed just like the Q9550. Unsurprisingly, these new 65W quad-core chips don't seem to lose anything in the performance department.
Of particular interest are the results from SANDRA's power management efficiency test. In this test, SANDRA runs a ALU performance benchmark while calculating the processor's power usage. The Q8200S had an overall power efficiency ratio score of 1.26 while the Q9550S managed even better at 1.30. It's worthy of note that these power efficiency values are calculated from system parameters as SANDRA does not measure power consumption directly, so they should be taken with a grain of salt.
