Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor review

Processors 199 Page 7 of 10 Published by

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Page 7 - Virus check - Audio conversion - Doom3

 

Virus Scan & Audio Conversion

Virus scanning has become a very common and crucial task for using PC in everyday life. New viruses are reported constantly and they spread rapidly through email and internet browsing. Virus scanner engines prevent these viruses to harm the user's system and they have become an essential part of a home user's PC as well. The component used in this test is the virus scanner from F-Secure Corporation.

Audio Conversion, a part of PCs evolution is the increase in entertainment usage. Listening to music and creating own playlists are common tasks to perform while operating a PC. Audio Conversion test uses the Ogg Vorbis audio compression. The Audio Conversion test compresses a 10 second wave format audio file sized approximately 1.7MB to Ogg Vorbis format and the time for encoding is measured.

Last real-word performance results before we dive into gaming on this platform.

Time for some games then. We will start off with a series of CPU limited games.

Doom 3

The breathtaking realism of the Doom 3 engine basically depends on two features; a realistic physics engine and a unified lighting scheme that incorporates detailed bump-mapping and volumetric shadows. Hardware older than GeForce 4/3 lack the flexibility and power to run Doom 3 with detailed features at an acceptable frame-rate. The engine is once again written in OpenGL.

DOOM 3 sports a brand spanking new game engine that's a marvel to see. The amount of special effects that master programmer John Carmack has whipped up show us environments that we've heard about but have never seen before. ID has made an engine that specializes around the type of game they made: dark, scary, and intense. The game takes place on a base on Mars in the year 2145. The environments will give you a feeling of claustrophobia, which is only heightened by the game's dark atmosphere. Every light in the game is cast by some actual light source somewhere. If there's no lights on in the room, you'll see literally nothing and will need to turn on a flashlight. Shoot out a light in the middle of a battle, and you'll need to fight blindly. Sometimes, graphics do truly contribute to atmosphere as well as gameplay and with DOOM 3 it's obvious that id understands this better than most game developers.

In a weird way it's almost impossible to fully describe what the game looks like, but needless to say its well beyond anything to date. Multi colored per-pixel lighting on bump-mapped surfaces. Each and every object in the game, including the teeth of the monsters you fight cast dynamic shadows, but not the jagged kind you mayve seen in other recent games. The shadows are done using Carmacks own algorithm. Im sure many of you have upgraded specifically for this game, but it appears as though the video card is by far the most important piece of hardware needed. With a Geforce 6800 Ultra you can run the game at insane resolutions with huge amounts of detail (something I thoroughly enjoyed), but even at the lowest resolution with the lowest amount of detail it looks jawbreaking.

Now focus closely on 1024x768. We do not hit graphics card bottlenecks at low resolutions, we run into a CPU bottlenecked situation. And that's what we are after, to see what the CPU can really do for us when we need it.

It's quite shocking to see a dual-core AMD64 Athlon FX pushing 157 FPS and a QX9650 @ 4 GHz push 260FPS !

Now the dreadful fact is that's all based on one core processor performance. Like pretty much any game to date, they are all single threaded.

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