The “Break it Down” Blog

If you are one of the folks, like me, that has been waiting for the Intel refresh of the quad-core chips before jumping on top of one, you were likely waiting to see how the QX9650 did before making your decision. (Double-check our previous coverage of the chips, their names and making sense of it all)

The QX9650 is the fastest quad-core CPU refresh that Intel will be releasing this year with slower packages coming out in January/Feb ‘08 time frame. So now that QX9650 is out, how does the “best case scenario” performance look?

Well first let’s point out that a killer video card is going to serve you much better for the cutting edge games (Crysis, UT3, etc.) than a super-fast processor because these games are so damn GPU-bound now. That being said, you should have a relatively nice CPU to start off with (2.66ghz Dual or Quad Core) before sinking a bunch on a nice graphics card.

So to get an idea of how this processor performs at CPU-bound operations, basically at things it does best, let’s look at HardOCP’s coverage of the Media Encoding/Decoding performance of this CPU.

If you give it a look, you’ll notice it’s really not that great or that much faster than the QX6850. While the QX9650 is based on the Yorkfield core which runs cooler and uses less energy, at a $1200 price point and offering not much more than 1-12% increase in performance, it’s a far cry from a must-have.

If anything I’d say get yourself the fastest dual-core you could afford right now and throw in a 8800 GTS that NVIDIA has planned for the 19th of this month, or one of the new 8800 GT that are performing so well at a $250 price point.

Unfortunately, with AMD lagging so far behind Intel, there is no incentive for Intel to push out new designs and faster chips at the break-neck speed they were maintaining before. We will have to wait until middle of ‘08 or Christmas ‘08 before we start to see another CPU war again I think.