Intel Core 2 Quad Q8400 CPU Review
Test Setup & 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 with 5,5,5,15 timings or DDR3-1333 with 7,7,7,20 timings. 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: GeForce GTX 280 WD150 "Raptor" HD Windows Vista Ultimate |
System 2: |
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We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA XII, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2009 suite with Intel's Core 2 Quad Q8400 processor (CPU Arithmetic, CPU Multimedia, Memory Bandwidth, and Cache and Memory). All of the scores reported below were taken with the processor running at its default clock speed of 2.66GHz with 4GB of DDR3-1333 memory.
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The Q8400 performed as expected in the SANDRA processor arithmetic and multimedia benchmarks. Our results were very close to SANDRA's Q9450 reference numbers and the chip was outperformed by faster Intel quad-core processors. The memory bandwidth test shows the performance gap between the X48 chipset versus current AMD chipsets, where the on-die memory controller of the AMD platform has the advantage. Of course, Intel saw the discrepancy and integrated the memory controller into the Core i7 processor family.
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