The Verdict

So I will not deny or dispute that quad-core processors face the troublesome issue that multi-threading hardly is supported by consumer software. But much like the move from single- to dual cores processors, the move is worth your while in the end as you have to face it, multi-core processing is the future. That also means that all important software in the future will have good support for it. But when's that time here ? One can only hope that it'll be very soon.

With that being said, I have to admit, it's really hard to convince you guys with the review we editors write. Especially on Guru3D.com it is somewhat hard to to get that message across since our reader base is targeted at the gaming community though with a passion for hardware. And especially in gaming today it's really hard to spot that difference as most games are single threaded. An overclocked E6600 processor will get you near same results compared to the QX9650 in games as shown today.

Things are changing though and ask any quad-core consumer, they will have no regret purchasing it whatsoever. It's the future guys. And with the future in mind today we brought you a review on the first ever built Penryn series based processor. If you are in the market for a processor of today's caliber the big question for you obviously would be, what would be the way to go .. the QX6850 or QX9650 ? Well, obviously at this very moment baseline performance among the two quad-cores isn't that different at all. It's definitely a few percent faster here and there.

Evidently I'd say go with QX9650 all the way though. In the future you'll start seeing advantages of the new SSE4 instruction set which will make a good difference. Next to that there's more L2 cache available to the processor and last but not least, that 45nm production is showing some serious advantages. With a stack load more transistors the thermal envelope is just short from asthonishing. Apply some proper cooling to this processor and it's an overclockers wet dream. I already explained to you that within half a minute we had the 4 cores running stable at 4 GHz. Who knows with even better cooling, a better BIOS revision where will it end ?

One of the items I didn't have time to test in-depth is power consumption. So I'll give you the base figure right here as we did run a very simple test. This is shocking though, grab a hold of something okay ? With a multi-core CPU benchmark we measured and noticed the QX6850 draw 255 Watt power draw (total for system with four cores crunching data), the QX9650 and now you'll be really surprised ... 182 Watt. No, the Penryn family of processors is without a doubt looking fantastic. Surely it's not a grand step compared over the previous generations product, no it's at least as good or mostly slightly better than that product. Yet combine the facts and with the power consumption and overclocking potential I'm pretty positive I convinced you what to opt for.

It's not cheap though. Expect a sales price of roughly a thousand dollars or 800-900 EUR in Europe, which is hard to justify for any consumer processor. But ever since Intel rolled out Core 2 Duo things really couldn't be better for them. Props should be given where deserved, this processor is astonishing to have in your PC.

Thanks go out to Intel Benelux for providing this sample.