When reviews of the Core 2 family of processors from Intel hit the web exactly 111 days ago, enthusiasts everywhere were pretty impressed with the performance. Here was a processor that, on its lower end, was vastly superior to anything the competition had to offer. A $300 Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 wiped the board with AMD’s top model, the FX-62, while its big brothers, the E6700 and X6800, made sure nobody had any doubts. In the last 111 days, countless more reviews have been published that further defined the end result: Intel had once again taken the processor performance crown.

But something else happened in the last 111 days as well. AMD loyalists around the world were left wondering what their favorite company had up their sleeves to combat this new Intel powerhouse. The answer came with the announcement, just 12 days after the Core 2 launch on the 26th of July, of something they were calling “4x4”, a radical new platform design that takes advantage of AMD’s historically strong communications bus and is expected to provide some impressive performance. Four processing cores and four graphics cores? Sounds like a gamer’s dream. The whole thing was strangely reminiscent of the launch of Intel’s Extreme Edition processors back in 2003, which attempted to trump AMD’s Athlon64 launch that happened earlier in the same week. It stands to reason that this announcement was strategically planned and poised to steal some of the Core 2 thunder.

However, Intel saw this one coming and, in true Intel fashion, made a nice little counter-announcement. You see, Intel was working on something themselves. Two Core 2 Duos on one chip, a “Core 2 Quad” as it were. Codenamed Kentsfield, or Clovertown for the server segment, this first-ever Quad-Core consumer CPU was slated for launch in early 2007. We presume that after hearing about this whole AMD “4x4” thing, Intel decided they would push that launch date up a bit, a good two or three months to be exact. Before AMD even announced their new technology to the public, rumors hit the web that Kentsfield would be hitting shelves sooner than expected. Shortly after, Intel confirmed these rumors at their fall Intel Developer Forum (IDF).

Sure, Intel’s first Quad-chip would not be the monolithic native quad-core beast many enthusiasts were expecting, but two unlocked E6700’s packaged on the same chip was not something to scoff at. Previews of Intel’s new Core 2 Extreme QX6700 dropped at the end of September after reviewers got their paws on the chip at the fall IDF. Since then, everyone’s been begging for a comprehensive review of the chip. Seeing as the NDA expires today, we thought we’d oblige.

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Features
Features (cont...)
Test Setup and Methods
Test Suite
Synthetic Tests
3DMark06
PCMark05, SuperPI
ScienceMark 2.0
Sandra 2007
Game Tests
Quake 4
F.E.A.R
Half-Life 2: Episode 1
Call of Duty 2
Oblivion
Multitasking
Overclocking
Final Thoughts and Conclusions