“Quad Core vs Dual Core” Shootout: Intel’s Q9550s vs. E8600, Part Two

Welcome to the second and latest part of our new series of shootouts. This time it is CPU vs CPU with the emphasis still on gaming performance.  Here we present the battle of Intel’s popular Penryn CPUs – overclocked Core 2 Duo vs. Core 2 Quad, E8600 vs. Q9550S.  We decided to break our rather extensive review of Q9550S into several standalone but related sections and this is the second part.  Up-until-now, we have always depended on our Core 2 Duo E8600 at 3.99 Ghz to set the benchmarks for our video cards.  Intel provided AlienBabelTech with an engineering sample of Q9550S which is their new 65 watt TDP low-power Core 2 Quad stock-clocked at 2.83 Ghz.  Weeks ago, we put our then brand-new Q9550S into extensive testing to finally try to answer the question: “Is a quad core CPU necessary to get the best out of today’s modern PC games, even paired with a powerful video card?” Until recently the answer was in doubt as the Core 2 Duo processors are clocked a bit higher than their Core 2 Quad counterparts and often they would get a much higher overclock than the warmer-running quad core CPUs.

The very same week that Intel sent us the Q9550S, Cooler Master also provided us with their basic CPU cooler, Hyper N520! So we  first spent a week with Intel’s Q9550-S beginning at stock speeds and voltages and then at progressively higher “mild” overclocks to get a feel for the new CPU and to know exactly how it performed before we started with its torture testing.  Finally we went for it’s maximum overclock at Intel’s highest recommended voltage. To continue in theme with all of our past Shootout articles, in this Part II of ‘Q9550S vs. E8600’, we wanted to know what effect overclocking the CPU has on graphics performance and ultimately how it affects the frame rates of the newer games we play. Of course, we are continuing to test at two of the most popular demanding wide-screen resolutions, 1680×1050 and 1920×1200, and with maximum DX10 details whenever it is available.

We also apologize for the delay in bringing you this shootout as we had a major equipment failure when our Q9550S vs. E8600? was delayed by a Motherboard Meltdown! Our ever-faithful ASUS P5E deluxe motherboard locked up and would no longer allow access to its BIOS and I had to get a very quick open-box replacement from NewEgg.com in a ASUS Rampage Formula motherboard.  After installing it, all the benchmarks were run all over again and the results were basically identical on both motherboards.  Of course, we wanted to be absolutely certain of our benchmarks; although ASUS P5E Deluxe and Rampage Forumula are laid out very slightly differently they are functionally identical and P5E Deluxe can even be flashed with the Rampage BIOS.

Part One of “Quad Core vs Dual Core” Shootout: Overclocking Intel’s Q9550s with Cooler Master Hyper N520,was a short Q9550S overclocking article using Cooler Master Hyper N520, where we simply set new overclocking benches with our condensed testing suite to measure performance, scaling and stability.  We also used Core Temp’s latest version, released last month, to make sure we did not get anywhere near Intel’s maximum T-junction temperatures of 100C.  We were quite impressed with the Cooler Master Hyper N520 as it was able to keep our Q9550S sufficiently cool to reach its maximum stable overclock of 3.99 Ghz at Intel’s maximum recommended core voltage.  Q9550S at 3.99 Ghz idled in the high-30s C and would jump into the 50s C under extreme load.  We gave it 4/5 “stars” as a very good bang-for-buck basic cooler that is extraordinarily quiet due to its well-designed twin-cooling fan design.  For this Part Two, we used both our Cooler Master Hyper N520 and our slightly more effective but more expensive and noiser, Thermalright/Scythe 120mm CPU cooler combination to cool both our overclocked Q9550S and E8600.

We were also totally impressed with Intel’s new Q9550S – it does everything our E8600 does, and then some!  It runs 30 watts lower TDP than the “non-S” Q9550 and our only potential complaint was its $100 price premium as similar overclocking results can be had with regular Q9550 CPUs that still can be found in the retail channel.  Of course, this will probably change as the best overclockers are probably picked from the center of the die for “S” Core 2 Quads now.  However, where the Q9550S will find an immediate home is with OEM builders that specialize in rack-mounted servers.  These low power and cooler running Q9550S CPUs are absolutely perfect for these OEMs, and in that case, the price premium is well worth it in our opinion.  We gave our Q9550S  “4-1/2 Stars” and an Editor’s Choice Award.  We will justify that score in this and also in the following article detailing Q9550S with multi-GPU scaling.  Our weeks spent with Q9550S has replaced E8600 as our CPU of choice and it is highly recommended for all PC gaming.  For applications that use more than two cores, Q9550S absolutely speeds past our E8600 even when it is clocked +260Mhz higher.  However, we are primarily PC gamers and we want to show you how quad core gaming compares with dual core gaming.

It is in this second part of this series that we will actually compare game benchmarks – “apples to apples” – with the Q9550S maximum 3.99 Ghz overclock to our E8600 also at 3.99 Ghz.  Finally we max our Core 2 Duo out at 4.25 Ghz – its very highest stable overclock on our P5E Deluxe motherboard – so that you can see what to pick for yourself if you need an upgrade.  We also test at 2.83 Ghz stock clocks for Q9550S as well as 3.40 Ghz, 3.62 Ghz and finally at 3.99 Ghz to see how frame rates may scale in game benchmarks and to try to find the “sweet spot” for a CPU overclock for playing PC games with HD4870 and GTX280 video cards.  By also overclocking E8600 another +260Mhz past Q9550S stable core speed to 4.25Ghz, we can see if E8600 can somehow compensate for Q9550S having two “extra” cores for the games that use them all.

We used our Kill-A-Watt meter extensively and although we could not compare Q9550S to the “non-S” version, our total system maxed out with 291 watts and HD4870 with everything screaming and max load on all 4 cores.  And interestingly we found some higher wattage used with Q9550S in certain games than with others – about 10 watts higher in World-in-Conflict than in Crysis !  We are thinking that perhaps Crysis does not use more than two cores. For the graphics, we will be using only two video cards this time – AMD’s HD4870 and Nvidia’s GTX280 to show the effect of different core speeds of both of our CPU’s overclocking performance on single-GPU powerful video cards in today’s most demanding games.  For Part III, the last of our Q9550S vs. E8600 series, we will use our full benchmark suite and concentrate on two multi-GPU setups – 4870-X2 and CrossFireX-3.  For this review, we picked seven modern PC games – Call of Juarez, Crysis, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Clear Sky,  PT Boats DX10 demo, FarCry2, World-in-Conflict, and X3 Terran Conflict – plus 2 synthetic Futuremark tests 3DMark06 and Vantage.   So let’s head for the testing bench and check out full disclosure: