Games
This is what everyone has been waiting for. Sure, the QX6700 has roughly twice the theoretical processing power of the X6800; we already knew that. But does this new Extreme Edition exceed at the task that Extreme Editions were originally designed for? While seeing theoretical performance in synthetic benchmarks is a good indication of the capabilities of your processor, the real worthwhile performance numbers are generated in games, where results are entirely indicative of real world performance. Here is how the QX6700 performs in the latest single-threaded and multi-threaded games.

Quake 4

Quake 4 is a game that can utilize symmetric multi-processing, or dual core CPUs. We investigated the performance benefits of using dual core and hyperthreading CPUs with Quake 4 in our previous article entitled “The Effect of Dual Core Patches”. We will be running this game on both processors with SMP turned on and OFF to see if there is indeed a performance benefit when the number of cores increases to four. We don’t expect there will be, but we can dream. Also, we have shown time and time again that Quake 4 is extremely CPU-limited on the low end, while being rather GPU-limited on the high-end. As such, we would expect the results on low settings to be more telling in terms of processor performance.





Here you can see that the QX6700 performs consistently worse than the X6800. This is undoubtedly due to the extra 266MHz on the X6800. It is also clear from these results that the multi-threaded capabilities of Quake 4 are limited to two cores, which we already kind of knew. Since Quake 4 is historically the game that benefits the most from symmetric multi-processing, we fear that this result may be a foreshadowing of things to come. Let’s find out.