Background task encoding
Sadly, it all starts to fall apart when we begin to analyse results from the other tasks running alongside one another. Quad FX may have an advantage with POV-ray on its own, but Intel's Core Microarchitecture takes the crown in media encoding. As a result, the QX6700's reduced performance in 3D rendering is more than made up for a comfortably quicker time completing our MP3 and DivX encoding tasks - despite running at an 11 per cent slower clock speed than Quad FX. To emphasise the above graph further, the time stated is for all the benchmarks to complete. Quad-core systems can run them concurrently but dual-core systems finish off with POV-ray running on its own. Taking this into account, the Core 2 Extreme X6800 is similarly quicker than the Athlon 64 FX-62.
So round two goes Intel's way, making it one all. Now we turn to the all-important gaming benchmarks for the decider.
