Gaming
With a game that isn’t optimised for multithreading like Far Cry, the single-core power of the X6800 wins true, but the Core 2 Quad is still way ahead of the Athlon 64.
Running Quake 4 at 1,024 x 768, the Core 2 again shows its raw prowess over the Athlon 64. Turning SMP on levels the playing field a bit between the Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Q-series, and Athlon 64, although the latter is still behind even the slowest Core 2 Quad Q6400. Quake 4 clearly gains quite a bit of benefit from SMP at low resolutions. But it is also clearly not getting a significant amount from the extra two cores on the Core 2 Quad. So Quake 4 may be optimised for dual-core, but it’s not yet ready for quad-core.
Run a high enough resolution and quality configuration to make the graphics card the bottleneck, however, and it almost doesn’t matter what CPU you use. Even the Pentium D 925 provides virtually the same frame rate, and SMP makes no difference either.
With Splinter Cell running at 1,024 x 768, we’re back to a game with no support for quad-core. So the QX6700 performs no better than an E6700 running at the same clock speed. What is more telling is that the Q6400 is almost on par with AMD’s Athlon 64 FX-62, again showing the Core Microarchitecture’s advantage. As if we needed to bang that point home any more.
