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Intel's Yorkfield QX9770 at 3.2 GHz I have the Power!!
(Review by Michael Schuette, November 25, 2007)

Conclusions and Dis-Illusions

Our benchmarking and real-world experience with the QX9770 has left us a bit confused and disillusioned. First and foremost, whatever energy efficiency was gained by Intel with the migration to the Penryn Core has been completely mitigated by the QX9770. The new flagship CPU is a power-hog reminiscent of the days of the Smithfield and Presler series. Suffice it to say that the power consumption is also reflected in the thermal characteristics of the processor. That thing runs hot. We were not using the standard Intel stock cooler but an old version that is a bit more massive and has quite a bit more cooling punch than the current versions. Even that did apparently not suffice, especially in situations of extended game play of Unreal Tournament3, Bioshock or Timeshift, the CPU fan would regularly spin up to wind tunnel noise levels and soon thereafter, the game started to become choppy.

Aside from the power measurement “sanity check” we compared gaming experience with the QX9770 to the QX9650 at the same settings, that is 3.2 GHz on a 400 MHz bus frequency and the memory running at DDR3-1600. Suffice it to say that – even though this is entirely subjective – there was no choppiness with the latter processor, even if we added additional workload in the form of decoding brain signals as game control using one of the OCZ Neural Impulse Actuator prototypes.

I can already hear some objections here, the Kentsfield and Presler / Smithfield CPUs draw even more power and there was never any mentioning of “overheating”. Well, if my memory still serves me, Presler had the same problem and, what is more important, the Yorkfield CPUs have a much smaller die which causes a much higher area power density despite a nominally lower overall power consumption.

Overclocked QX9650 to 4.7 GHz ... not entirely stable though!

Another conundrum is the fact that according to common knowledge, the QX9650 and the QX9770 are technically speaking identical. However, there are a number of things that could be changed without doing a hardware revision of the CPU. For example, the I/O voltage that is derived from the common power supply could be changed to accommodate the higher bus speed. Likewise, the I/O buffers could be programmed to change their drive strength… and so on and so forth. Everybody seems to have the same problem with respect to the QX9770 and everybody thinks that they just got a particularly bad QX9770. Well, maybe not. At this point the main advice we would suggest is to skip the QX9770 and instead use a QX9650, after all, it can be overclocked and the multipliers are locked upwards only anyway. Speaking of overclocking, we managed (with a little bit of extra cooling) to push the QX9650 all the way up to 4.7 GHz …. and no way of getting the QX9770 anywhere near there.

(BX80557E6300)

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