Intel's Core 2 Quad Extreme Edition QX6850 and Core2 E6750 part 2

Rendering Performance

POV Ray is one of the oldest raytracing programs out there and it has been updated I don't know how many times since we started using it first in 1997. One of the issues we observed repeatedly was that the SSE2 render engine was slower than the standard version. WIth the 3.7 beta .21, this has changed, the standard version turned out to be markedly slower than the "formerly slower" SSE2 version. Due to the expiration of the older version, we show data obtained with the latest beta with the caveat that they may not be exactly comparable with the older results.

Media Encoding

Video and audio encoding are becoming increasingly important in the world of personal computing. Home-editing of videos and sound recordings are among the popular applications as is just the standard archiving of DVD material. In the case of audio encoding, there is relatively little out there in terms of applications that are multithreaded, meaning that they would take advantage of multiple cores. Or if there are appications like that, they are not free and the generally short conversion times achieved with free download utilities do not provide enough anguish to actually purchase potentially faster, multithreaded applications.For this article we used three applications that at least ran in the 80-85% CPU utilization when encoding audiovisual material, namely DVD-Shrink 3.2. Dr.DivX 2.0 OSS and the latest version of Mainconcept, namely H.264 Encoder.

In the case of DVD-Shrink we compressed John Grisham's "Runaway Jury" from 4,464 MB to 3,323MB, a compression to 59.6%. Dr.DivX encoded a 4.2 MB file (Watermellon.mpg) to a DivX file at Extreme Quality (thread priority: low) and Mainconcept encoded the same Watermellon.mpg file to an [H.264] High, 1920 x 1080 pixel, 29.97 fps, 48,000Hz 16 bit MPG file.

3dMark 06

Conclusion

Intel once again came, saw and won and did so consistently by a landslide. The combination of DDR3, a new memory controller and the faster host bus interface turned out to be quite the "trio infernale", leaving the competition nothing but tears in their eyes. Rumor has it that the next generation Penryn CPUs will up the ante again over what we are seeing now, and the upcoming X38 platform will equally hit another homerun.

At this point, we cannot comment on products that have not been released yet. Fact is, though, that AMD will need a pretty gigantic leap to overturn the current market situation. On the other hand, it is not always top performance that counts, conservative power management and ultra-low pricing are the dominating factors in the bread and butter market.

All of that said and done, there is one last thing to do and that is to award Intel one of our coveted "Editor's Choice Awards". Well done!