Multitasking
Here is where things get interesting. The multi-tasking performance of the QX6700 is pretty much guaranteed to be better than that of any other consumer-level processor due to the simple fact that it has four physical processing cores. Previous Extreme Edition chips, like the 965 and 955, touted four processing cores, but of those, 2 were physical and two were logical. Logical cores (Hyper-Threading) are good, but the performance has been proven to be not nearly on the same level as a true dual-core or multi-core configuration. When you run an application, it is assigned a core affinity, meaning core 0 or 1 if you have a dual-core CPU. If it is single-threaded, it will run exclusively on that core. Run something else, and it might be assigned to core 1. You can sometimes set the affinity to run by adding a –A1 tag to target field in the shortcut properties, but that is not always guaranteed to work. If the CPU is loaded 100%, then any further programs you start will be budgeted into the CPU time and result in decreased performance across the board. We have already seen this with Benchmark + Prime95 tests we ran above. Now with a quad-core processor, you have twice the capacity. Let’s illustrate this graphically. The following test was performed with several programs/applications running in the background. They are: Streaming audio from WMP11, Ventrilo (VoIP), Downloading three games on Steam (Defcon, Dark Messiah, HL2:LC), mIRC, one instance of Prime95, and Adobe Photoshop was open but not running anything.



As stated in our previous mention of F.E.A.R, the game is extremely sensitive to minor fluctuations in hardware settings and system load. That makes it a very good platform to test multi-tasking with, since all of these programs will be adding their own bit of load to the CPU. You can see that the QX6700 is on an entirely different level than the X6800 in terms of multi-tasking. Where the X6800 suffered a 174 frame loss, the QX6700 took a mere 12 frame hit. This is a HUGE difference. This is a 37% performance hit with the X6800 that was pretty much avoided on the QX6700. Granted, gamers are most likely not going to be running an instance of Prime95 in the background while gaming. However, they could very well be running an instance of F@H, and the other applications listed are fairly commonly used. While the QX6700 was inferior to the X6800 in basically all of our gaming tests (with the exception of CoD2, but this was most likely a multi-tasking issue as well), it seems to make up for it in the multi-tasking department.

Not necessarily totally relevant to our audience, but important nonetheless, are the benefits this could potentially provide to digitally-oriented professionals. Running 3D Studio MAX, Adobe Premiere, After Effects, Combustion and watching your favorite episode of The Office has never seemed so easily do-able before. This processor, in the right hands, could increase workplace productivity enormously. Spend a cool grand on this processor, earn millions in return? Potentially.