Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Quad Core CPU

 

Quake 4 is a game built on the Doom 3 engine. Benchmarking was performed using Quake4Bench and a custom timedemo recording along with 0xAA, 0xAF settings at a resolution of 1024×768 for maximum stress on the CPU. The benchmark was set to run a total of 5 times, with Quake4Bench automatically calculating an average result at the end of the run.

 

 

Quake4 certainly produced some strange results with the Q6600 only managing an average of 55FPS despite SMP being enabled in the benchmark options. Regardless of this, the QX9650 still managed to pull some decent numbers,  beating the E6850 by 4FPS.

 

 

 

F.E.A.R. is a game based on the Lithtech Jupiter EX engine. It has volumetric lighting, soft shadows, parallax mapping and particle effects. Included in the game is a benchmark facility that taxes the entire PC system. This benchmark was run a total of 5 times, with the highest and lowest results being excluded and an average being calculated on the remaining 3 results.

 

 

F.E.A.R gave pretty equal results across the board,  possibly pointing to a GPU bottleneck – even with the relatively low resolution and texture filtering settings used.

 

 

 

Bioshock is a recent FPS shooter by 2K games. Based on the UT3 engine it has a large amount of advanced DirectX techniques including excellent water rendering and superb lighting and smoke techniques. All results were recorded using F.R.A.P.S with a total of 5 identical runs through the same area of the game. The highest and lowest results were then removed, with an average being calculated from the remaining 3 results.

 

 

After taking into consideration the margin for possible error on a FRAPS benchmarked game, there really is no difference between each of the three processors. As with F.E.A.R this is quite possibly down to a GPU bottleneck, so it would certainly be interesting to re-visit this chip with a much more powerful graphics card.