PCMark Vantage
Futuremark’s newest benchmark suite, PCMark Vantage, was released just a week or two ago and we published an initial article on the new software that looked at some CPU performance as well as providing overviews for all the individual testing suites it uses and what kind of applications they emulate.  The new Vantage software takes a much more real-world user-scenario approach to testing that previous PCMark software and as such deserves more time our benchmark analysis.

If you haven’t yet done so, I would HIGHLY recommend you head over to my previous article that has a lot of detail on what these PCMark Vantage tests actually do.  That will give you a better understanding of the results to aid in your potential purchasing decision.

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Yorkfield Processor Review - Processors 51

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Yorkfield Processor Review - Processors 52

The Overall PCMark score is generated from this test, which is really just a collection of tests from the other complete testing suites.  Things like basic gaming, photo editing, audio transcoding, music library catalog analyzing and security encrypting are all tested to result in this score.  Obviously some of these tests will stress the CPU more than the memory, etc, so it is a gauge of overall system performance.  Our results here show the QX9650 to be the overall leader with both quad-core CPUs pulling ahead by a noticeable margin.  The AMD 6000+ and 5600+ are competitive though against the X6800 and the E6750 – almost a win for AMD in this review.

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Yorkfield Processor Review - Processors 53

This suite has actions like photo manipulation, photo importing, color correction and even home video editing and because of that the quad-core processors are again the hands down winner.  The QX9650 is able to out perform the QX6850 by just under 5% but is 22.6% faster than the top dual-core CPU.

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Yorkfield Processor Review - Processors 54

This suite looks at playback of HD content as well as video transcoding and DVR functionality.  Again we can see the advantages of both the quad-core processor model and the new Yorkfield core as it is able to pull away slightly from the QX6850 CPU. 

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 Yorkfield Processor Review - Processors 55

Basically a subset of the 3DMark06 test, the gaming section of PCMark Vantage looks at gaming load speeds (which is largely HDD dependent) as well various game demo engines to judge the affect of your CPU and GPU.  The performance gaps here are much lower than we have seen in the other Vantage tests, thanks in large part to the non-CPU dependent nature of most of the tests.  The level loading is mostly HDD bound while the gaming tests are of course tough on the GPU.
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