Page 10 - Conclusion
The Verdict
Alright the verdict then. Again, performance of this processor is jaw-breaking sweet, really really sweet. I so wish that today's games would already support multi core processing and threading. It's just not the case yet, and I stated this before, I will not deny that quad-core processors face the bothersome concern 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 facts. Things are slowly changing though and ask any quad-core consumer, they will have no regret purchasing it whatsoever. Multi-processor / multi-threaded solutions are the future you guys.
So I asked myself this question, would I buy a QX9770 over the QX9650 ? And the answer is no.
Firstly there's an impact on power consumption big-time. Where the QX9650 remained below 200 Watts for the system in total (measured during CPU test) you can easily add another 50 Watts with today's tested processor. There's no way for me to check it, but likely there's a direct correlation between the 1600 MHz FSB and it's power consumption. See, your mainboard chipset frequency is increased, resulting in much higher numbers. So the biggest thing for me on the QX9650 was observing the higher power consumption, this is the beauty of the QX9650, it's where it shines. With the QX9770 that consumption simply is higher, along with your processor temperatures.
The biggest worry however is finding full chipset (mainboard) support. There's not one mainboard out there with official 1600 MHz FSB support. There however are some out there that can support it. The Intel X38 series mainboards for example. Now we tested on 680i, and failed. A mainboard that can easily do a 1600 MHz FSB. We did emulate and saved the QX9770 clocks on a Q6600, swapped the processor and every now and then it would boot. But it was short from a nightmare. My bad though, I mean the NF680i does not support the processor, with heaps of luck we got it running though. On the 780i mainboard we did have it running, yet nVIDIA officially does not support 1600 MHz processors. We had an engineering sample CPU so I just do not know how well that'll play out in the near future just yet.
The ASUS X38 based mainboard and DDR3 memory made all these problems go away and the processor ran instantly. But let's see, that's 300 EUR for the mainboard, 250 for the memory and likely 1100 EUR for the processor. Now drop in a HDD, DVD-Writer, nice Chassis, 650 Watt PSU, Nice graphics card... etc, and this PC can easily total to 2000 EUR. That's top dollar, or top-EUR (whatever you prefer ;).
Given the fact that you'll likely have to upgrade your mainboard and likely memory as well this will make the upgrade very expensive, too expensive for the most of us. Take in consideration that the QX9650 will clock to 3.2 GHz easily as well and bare in mind that the performance difference over the 1333 FSB based QX9650 is just over 5% in most scenarios.
So there's just some more bang for bucks to be found in that CPU.
No doubt here, this the fastest quad-core processor on this globe. We can't deny though that with the QX9770 something extraordinary is happening. We are on the verge of new FSB speeds. Running high-end processors on a 1600 MHz is an achievement by itself, extraordinary interesting. Expect a sales price of roughly 1400 USD / 1100 EUR, which is hard to justify for any consumer processor. But looking purely at the hardware, this processor is nothing short of astonishing to have in your PC. You'll shout "Hihoo Silver" while using the PC, with silver being a verb for that square shaped processor of yours.
Special thanks go out to Asus, Intel, komplett.nl & OCZ for making this article happen.
