POV-Ray rendering
As a control, we ran POV-Ray on its own. This is a different working set compared to the one we use for our regular CPU reviews. We've opted for the chess version because it can be scripted alongside other tasks.
It's obvious that Quad FX's pair of 3GHz processors win out in this extremely well multithreaded test. Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX6700 is around 9 per cent behind, thanks to its lower 2.66GHz clock. But the tables are turned with the dual-core platforms, as the Core 2 Extreme X6800 runs at 2.93GHz whereas the Athlon 64 FX-62 is only at 2.8GHz.
When we ran all our other applications in the background, meaning two iterations of MP3 encoding and four of DivX, the POV-ray rendering performance was at least three times slower on all systems. You will notice that the difference between the two quad-core systems reduces to virtually nothing. What is more obvious, however, is that the dual-core PCs have slowed down a lot more, and are now four times slower. The Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 has increased its lead over the AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 to 23 per cent. We must note that the Quad FX score was quite variable even over 7 runs, with a minumum/maximum scores of 1600/1932, respectively.
So far, then, Quad FX is looking like a quad-core contender, but Intel rules the more mainstream dual-core roost. So what about those media encoding tasks we also ran?
