IV. Benchmarking

Stock Settings
For benchmarking, the stock settings will serve as the baseline scores. Note that all settings here are on automatic, with the RAM frequency running in sync with CPU system bus. With the advent of this new processor, the minimum speed of RAM to be used must be a DDR2-533MHz.

For the stock settings, all benchmark results will be acquired from three(3) runs, removing the highest and lowest score, but not averaging the total score of the three. This limit the number of random peaks of scores, and hopes to reduce the number of random unusual results. There will be no online submission of score because of time constraint and software limitation.

Temperature at idle hovers at 49C, while shoots to as high as 63c. The reference stock cooler is enough to cool this processor. Retail processors are equipped with better fan, that is, at least, better in terms of cooling. It is because retail fan don't have VSF controller, making it always running at near full speed. The motherboard is also known to read the temperature about 15c to 20c higher than comparable 3rd party motherboards.

::Multimedia Rendering::

Cinebench 9.5

::Subsystem Test::

SuperPi 1M

PCMark02

PCMark05

Sandra-CPU

Sandra-Multimedia

Sandra-RAM Bandwidth

::3D Test::

3DMark03

3DMark05

3DMark06

::Gaming::

Doom3 640x480

The processor has clearly shown that when programs are optimized to take advantage of multi cores, then this will own every other processors available in the market. There is just no equal in terms of pure raw massive performance power when it comes to parrallel threads benchmarking.

While other programs like PCMark02 and SuperPi 1M doesn't boast any improved performance, in fact, it is slower than the faster clocked X6800, these programs aren't designed for multi-cores and as such doesn't benefit at all from the massive reserve performance that the quad core can unlease. By moving to programs such as Cinebench 9.5, then the fangs begins to show.

3DMark06 is the only 3D benching program that can unleash and show the reserve multi-tasking capability of the quad core. 3DMark03 and 3DMark05 lags behind with multi-threading and if 3DMark is any indication of games, both current and future, games that aren't optimized for multi-cores can't really get the full benefit but games that are multicore-aware will surely be rewarded.

SANDRA tests have shown the incredible power of this quad core beast and it doesn't linearly scare against the other dual core processors. Much like Cinebench 9.5, the difference is definitely out of the charts. This benchmark shows that the next leap from NetBurst* is to Core* and then followed by Core* Quad-based.