Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770 Performance Preview

We continue our test coverage with a few more modules from the comprehensive PCMark Vantage suite of benchmarks.

Futuremark PCMark Vantage  Synthetic Benchmarks

Vantage TV and Movies suite includes the following tests:

TV and Movies 1 - Two simultaneous threads, Video transcoding: HD DVD to media server archive, Video playback: HD DVD w/ additional lower bitrate HD content from HDD, as downloaded from the net

TV and Movies 2 - Two simultaneous threads, Video transcoding: HD DVD to media server archive, Video playback, HD MPEG-2: 19.39 Mbps terrestrial HDTV playback

TV and Movies 3 - HDD Media Center

TV and Movies 4 - Video transcoding: media server archive to portable device, Video playback, HD MPEG-2: 48 Mbps Blu-ray playback

In the TV and Movies test suite, multi-threaded processing with a larger number of cores at work, leveled the playing field a bit more.  In fact, the Phenom 9700 and 9600 put up a solid performance and kept pace with a similarly clocked Core 2 Quad chip.  Regardless, the new 3.2GHz Core 2 Extreme QX9770 offers the best available performance in this test, besting AMD's fastest chip by a significant 15% margin.

Vantage Music suite includes the following tests:

Music 1 - Three simultaneous threads, Web page rendering – w/ music shop content, Audio transcoding: WAV -> WMA lossless, HDD: Adding music to Windows Media Player

Music 2 - Audio transcoding: WAV -> WMA lossless

Processing and transcoding audio content proved to offer similar results as the TV and Movies test but also favoring pure clock speed a bit more.  As you can see, a 3GHz Core 2 Duo offers better performance than a 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad not to mention the 2.4GHz quad-core Phenom 9700.  The new Core 2 Extreme QX9770 is some 38% faster than AMD's fastest single chip solution here and over 10% faster than the dual socket quad core Athlon 64 FX-74 system.

Courtesy, Futuremark:  "Gaming is one of the most popular forms of entertainment for all ages. Today’s games demand high performance graphics cards and CPUs to avoid delays and sluggish performance while playing. Loading screens in games are yesterday’s news. Streaming data from an HDD in games – such as Alan Wake™ – allows for massive worlds and riveting non-stop action. CPUs with many cores give a performance advantage to gamers in real-time strategy and massively multiplayer games. Gaming Suite includes the following tests: "

Gaming 1 - GPU game test

Gaming 2 - HDD: game HDD

Gaming 3 - Two simultaneous threads, CPU game test, Data decompression: level loading

Gaming 4 - Three simultaneous threads, GPU game test, CPU game test, HDD: game HDD

The  PCMark Vantage Gaming test needs little explanation, the numbers speak for themselves.  This test is basically a re-run of the Futuremark's 3DMark 06 engine, so the chips fall as expected.  At 6% more performance versus the QX9650 and 30% faster than the next fastest chip, the AMD Phenom 9700, the new QX9770 is easily king of the hill here.

The overall PCMark Vantage score is a weighted average of all of the modules in the Vantage suite calculated in total "PCMarks".  Here are the results:

The numbers do the talking here just fine.  You really don't even need us to provide commentary but of course we will anyway.  You want the fastest single-chip (or even multi-chip) desktop CPU on the planet right now?  According to PCMark Vantage, you need to look no further than the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770.