Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 Reviews

An anonymous reader writes, "The first reviews of Intel's new quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6700 have emerged this morning and opinion is mixed. TrustedReviews were blunt: 'There is nothing new on display here. Very few people will need quad cores...' while Tech Report think 'many owners of this beast may be stuck waiting for new applications to arrive that use it to its fullest ability.' The boys at bit-tech managed to overclock to 3.47GHz and found the first killer application: quad-core support in the Source Engine! Nice!"

Not really needed yet

[ArcherB]

I had a chance to play with one of these bad boys at my last job as a QA engineer. With the tools I had available (games and basic Windows tools), I was not able to get the processor above 40% utilization. Any slow down was due to HDD access rather than the processor. So while I was able to play Ghost Recon at full res and run a virus scan while I ripped an audio CD, the only drop in game play came when the game had to access the HDD. There was no real performance boost over the Core2 Duo. So what we need is a much faster way access files to see any real performance gains. I'm holding out for affordable solid state HDD's.

Multi-core at the low end.

[argent]

I wish they'd work on low-end 4- or more core processors.

For general computing, I'd rather have a quad-core 500 MHz processor than a single-core 2 GHz one. It'd run cooler and be more responsive, even though the peak performance would be lower.

Ideally I'd like a computer with a display engine running an OpenGL-based remote display server, and one or more compute engines... and maybe even a separate processor for the file system with its own battery-backed RAM. Not just a RAID controller, a NAS box inside the computer.