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Intel's Core 2 Quad Extreme Edition QX6850 and Core2 E6750 Host bus: 1333 MHz
(Review by MS, July 15, 2007)

Summary

Intel is releasing its latest steps in evolution of the CPU, that is, the Conroe and Kentsfield cores souped up to run on a 1333 MHz bus interface. Combined with the latest P35 chipset and some fast DDR3, do the new kids on the block have what it takes to up the ante again? Read on...

Evolution of a Winner

There is hardly a shadow of doubt about who owns the desktop performance segment. Intel’s Core2 design has re-created the Caesarian motto Veni Vidi Vici by sweeping essentially every single benchmark that is out there, from gaming applications to rendering performance and encoding, whatever could be won was – indeed – won. Part of the Imperial Laurels have to be attributed to the quad-core offerings, like the Core2 Quad Extreme 6700 and 6800. Despite sharing the same host bus these quad core processors have managed to stay abreast of the competition, courtesy of highly sophisticated memory management that, regardless of the rather pedestrian values in synthetic benchmarks, appears to provide the correct data in sufficiently timely fashion. Needless to say, though that this is still one of the bottlenecks in the overall system architecture and this is where the new processors identified by a -50 as their last two product numbers promise some major improvement.

To make a long story short, Intel is doing three things simultaneously, each of which synergistically contributes to an overall increase in performance. The first thing is the introduction of a new, lower latency memory controller as part of the P35 chipset. The second factor is the introduction of DDR3 that finally overcomes some of the childhood maladies of DDR2. The third factor is what offsets the new line of CPU from its predecessors, they are running at a whopping 1333 MHz host bus interface. To be true, it is a 333 MHz clock and the bus is quad-pumped for 1333 MHz data rate over a 64-bit interface that in the final analysis is capable of transferring 10.67 GB sec from the system logic a.k.a. North Bridge to the CPU and vice versa.

The P35 Stop Gap

Before delving into performance issues, we would like to mention a few other things. The P35 chipset as it is almost common knowledge is only an intermediate chipset on the way to the next best thing coming from Intel, that is the X38 chipset. A lesser known fact is that aside from Intel, nVidia is also grinding the battleaxes by releasing BIOS updates for their nForce 680i chipset enabling 1333 MHz support along with future support for the Penryn core – for the time being with DDR2 support only but there is also a DDR3 version on the horizon.

Needless to say that even the threesome of evolutionary improvements neither can nor will result in a cataclysm of the known performance world, but small steps, especially in combination, are often enough to smoke the rest of the field by numbers. The Core2 Duo 6750 was already released some 2 weeks ago, however, due to time constraint, we are combining the reviews of both the Core2 Duo 6750 and the Core2 Quad Extreme 6850 into a single article.

(BX80557E6300)

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