Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 and Massive Price Cuts
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 16, 2007 3:04 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
Despite theoretical showings on paper, the 1333MHz FSB appears to do very little for performance even when feeding four of Intel's fastest cores. The Core 2 Extreme QX6850's performance is nothing to scoff at, but given its price tag we'd strongly recommend one of the cheaper quad-core offerings. With the Q6600 coming in at $266, it's tough to resist.
Our Q6600 recommendation really highlights the major focus of this story, and that is the escalating price war between AMD and Intel. Once Intel's price cuts take effect next week, it's going to be difficult to recommend any AMD CPUs above $150. We're still working on our low end CPU comparison, and we suspect that AMD is more competitive at the lower end of the price spectrum, but what we've seen here today doesn't look good at all for the mainstream segment. In order to remain competitive, AMD would either have to knock about $50 off its X2 6000+ price or count on Phenom making up the performance gap at the same price point.
It's tough to resist upgrading or building a new system today because of the tremendous value this last round of price cuts has given us, especially when you take into account that both Penryn and Phenom's respective launches remain largely unknown. Clock speeds, pricing and dates are still up in the air, and for once our recommendation isn't simply to wait and see what happens.
If you need a new system or CPU upgrade today, the chips are ripe for the picking.
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xsilver - Wednesday, July 18, 2007 - link
One question has still yet to be answered:how far does the e6850 overclock vs how far the q6600 overclocks
from previous articles the q6600 doesnt reach much beyond 3ghz unless you have supercooling?
but the e6850?
Slash3 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
I know this is a bit after the fact, but would it be possible on the "vs" charts, to plot the negative performance improvements (read: performance loss) in a left-of-center fashion, instead of having both extending to the right of zero, with a negative sign tacked on? It makes it pretty difficult to scan visually. Go from -100 to 0 to +100 in the same X axis, and just increase the granularity a bit to fit things on, in cases where there are significant negative values. The E6850 vs Q6600 is a good example. Negative and positive, all over the place. Just friendly commentary. Excellent writeup, otherwise. :)DerekWilson - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
as was explored in a previous video artilce, we could simply add 100 to each of these and compare the bars with 100 percent meaning eqivalent performance. negatives would be less than 100 while positives would be greater than 100 ...personally, i don't mind the negaive numbers in a different color paradigm. if the readers would prefer the "centered at 100%" style, we will certainly adapt.
i don't know how the other editors here feel, but marketing guys like to show us graphs around 100% performance of something ... because of that, it just ends up feeling wrong to me. :-)
dev0lution - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
No red lines? That's a pretty impressive lineup for the prices Intel has. Looks like there might be Q6600 in my future very soon :)tuteja1986 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
where is this price cut.. i don't seem em in newegg.webdawg77 - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
July 22ndDerekWilson - Monday, July 16, 2007 - link
fixed the red lines issueThatguy97 - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link
back then i stuck to dual core with my e6600 going all the way up to 4ghz ish speeds