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

Conclusion

From our testing with Q9550S compared with E8600, we note that the Core 2 Quad does not as yet have a huge advantage in the games that we explored over Core 2 Duo – especially if you can get a nice overclock.  We do see that there are several games where the Quad core has a definite advantage and we expect devs to program for more cores as newer games are released and eventually quad core will be much more important.   We also see mixed scaling results.  Some games get a nice boost from overclocking the CPU whereas others are far more GPU-dependent, especially since we have the tendency to completely max out the details at relatively high resolutions.  We do see that “stock” 2.83 Ghz at times does hold back especially GTX280 performance a bit and at least a modest overclock to 3.40 Ghz does make some difference in the framerates.  However, if you can push your CPU even further, we also see that some games continue to benefit from the highest overclock, even with a single powerful GPU.

There are still many more questions to be answered and we will have a much more detailed testing of this same platform emphasizing multi-GPU performance – HD4870-X2 and CrossFireX-3.  We want to see if a faster CPU benefits even faster graphics. We will also begin with the very latest driver set available to us right now.  This future testing and final article should be done within two weeks – baring further hardware failures or illness.  After that, we expect to compare the maturing Intel Core i-7 CPU platform with our currently maxed out Penryn system. Eventually, we expect to also explore Nvidia GTX280/285 SLi on an X58 motherboard. And we will prepare for it by upgrading to Vista64-bit and give you a comparison vs. gaming on Vista32.

Our “Shoot-out Series”has been a steady progression examining Intel’s “Penryn” platform; one of the most popular platforms for gaming and we have been upgrading it as necessary, to maximize our PC’s gaming performance and to chart those improvements for you. Our last article, Part IV, The Summary, continued our new tradition in comparing drivers and you can actually follow our progress back to August, to Part I when we began benchmarking, even before ABT launched on October 1st, 2008.  And we focused on the progress the vendors have made since then, right on through the beginning of 2009 bringing us up to date with this current CPU shootout. Since our Part III motherboard comparison was benched, each vendor has released 4 sets of drivers and we compared all of them with each other. Of course, it involved a lot of charts, nearly one hundred!

In our installment of Part III, Big GPU Shootout, PCIe 1.0 vs. PCIe 2.0, we especially focused on the motherboard’s effects on video card performance. We used the extremes – P35 PCIe 1.0 vs. X48 PCIe 2.0 with double the bandwidth and a full 16x + 16x PCIe crossfire lanes – verses the much more bandwidth-constricted 16x + 4x crossfire lanes used in the older motherboard. We saw how limiting the older motherboard’s PCIe bandwidth can be in certain situations and so we upgraded to X48.

Part II – The Big GPU Shoot-Out – Setting New Benches – also covered Catalyst 8.9 vs. Geforce 178.13 and was also tested on our P35 motherboard (PCIE 1.0/Crossfire 16x+4x) and demonstrated to us the need for overclocking our E8600 CPU from its stock 3.33 Ghz to nearly 4.0 Ghz to take full advantage of our new video cards. We also set new benchmarks with these drivers that we are still continuing to use into Part IV. Part II added a couple of more games over Part I and refined our testing slightly. We also noted that the ranking of the new video cards has remained the same: 4870-X2, GTX280 and 4870 while crossfireX-3 got more mature drivers over the last Catalyst 8.8 set.

Part I, The Big GPU Shootout: Upgrade Now or Wait? covered Catalyst 8.8 vs. Geforce 177.41 on Intel’s P35 platform as we examined the performance of five video cards. The new cards we tested were: HD4870-512MB, HD4870X2-2GB, GTX280; while 8800GTX & 2900XT represented the top and mid-range cards of the last generation. In our conclusions, we realized that last generation’s video cards are not sufficient for today’s Vista DX10 maxed-out gaming – even at 1650×1080 resolution. We even started by comparing Core 2 Duo E4300 at it its overclock of 3.33 Ghz to E8600 at its stock 3.33 GHz and found the older CPU rather lacking in comparison. We then continued on for the rest of our series with our E8600 which we later overclocked to nearly 4.0 Ghz for the next 3 reviews. This changed in the last review, when we now use Core 2 Quad Q9550S. We also started to bench with crossfireX-3 in Part I which ran on fairly immature drivers and we have continued to chart its progress until now.

Stay tuned. We think we will have some very interesting articles for you to read very shortly as you plan your own coming upgrades. Well, we are done with our benches and this part of our “Shootout” Series and we will be working on our next article: “Quad core vs. Dual core shootout: Q9550S vs. E8600”, Part 3, emphasizing multi-GPU scaling with Q9550s.  In the meantime, feel free to comment below, ask questions or have a detailed discussion in our ABT forums.  We also want to let you know we are running a brand new promotion with prizes and a contest next month, March, in our forums.   Look for an announcement this weekend on the main ABT page.  There are many good articles to be published here shortly.  We want you eventually to join us and Live in Our World. It is going to expand and we think you will like what you progressively discover here.

Mark Poppin

ABT editor

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