“Q9550S vs. E8600” delayed by Motherboard Meltdown!
Sometimes things do not go as planned and I thought I’d give you an update on my Q9550s vs E8600 – Quad Core vs. Dual Core Shootout. Three weeks ago, we originally got an engineering sample of Q9550S from Intel. It is the new low-power quad core Penryn CPU. Part One went up a couple of weeks ago: Overclocking Intel’s Q9550s with Cooler Master Hyper N520 . . . Part One of “Quad Core vs Dual Core” Shootout.
Yesterday afternoon, I was really done with Part Two of my benching when I swapped out Q9550s and put in E8600 for ONE last test of Crysis. ‘Why’, you may well ask. Well, I discovered that Crysis apparently uses 10 watts less power with Q9550 at 4 Ghz than World in Conflict does, and I just needed to compare E8600’s power consumption with these two games and to check it with Kill-a-Watt again. My motherboard is the usually very reliable ASUS P5e deluxe and everything has been working perfectly since last Summer.
Of course, I did remember to set everything back to stock before I shut down my PC. On boot-up, it recognized my CPU correctly as E8600 – but at 2.83Ghz! Exploring further, the multiplier was no longer correct nor was it available to change and when I tried to load ‘defaults’, the BIOS screen completely froze. When we tried to get back into BIOS after resetting the CMOS, it wouldn’t go past the BIOS first screen; eventually nothing at all. Of course, trying every combo of HW possible did not make any difference and I guess it is heading to ASUS for RMA this week.
Well, my article is now a bit delayed further. I am still able to do Part Two of “Quad core vs Dual core Shootout” and it should be up in a couple of days. Fortunately, my back-up PC and external hard drive are available so all my data is available to write my article. This very next article covers Quad core scaling with HD4870 and GTX280 and compares E8600 at 3.99 Ghz and 4.25 Ghz with Q9550S at stock 2.83 Ghz, 3.4 Ghz, 3.6 Ghz and at 3.99 Ghz. Finally, to complete Part Three of this Quad vs. Dual Core shootout series, an ASUS Rampage motherboard should be arriving in a couple of days from NewEgg. Although it is “open box”, we are pretty confident that we can use it to replace the ASUS P5e deluxe as they are functionally identical. I was actually planning to flash my now broken P5e Deluxe BIOS into Rampage.
To summarize my personal hardware debacle, Part Two of Quad core vs Dual Core – Q9550S vs E8600 is a bit delayed and should still be up this week. Part Three – exploring multi-GPU with 4870-X2 and CrossFireX-3 scaling with Quad core – is still on track for the next weekend and should be up March first. In the meantime, we are working hard to bring you up-to-date news and articles that are useful to you. Expect a FarCry2 game review that also focuses on multiplayer. We have a new high-quality mid-tower case review coming this week also. Best of all, we are now working on an ABT contest for March – with nice prizes to giveaway to you!!
Stay tuned. I apologize for my delays and I promise to make it up for you. Feel free to sign up at ABT forums and say what is on your mind. Our international staff is always available to answer your questions and we expect to stay responsive to what you want us to explore for you in our hardware testing.
Mark Poppin
ABT Editor
