Introduction

Intel's Core architecture has really made a huge impression on the CPU war between AMD and Chipzilla. Not long ago Intel was in hot water over its Peltier-element temp running Prescott based CPUs, running single core on them was bad enough, but dual core pushed the thermal envelope to 130+ watts. This was AMD's time to shine, managing to get its CPUs to run at just over 60 watts in thermal displacement out of the same 90nm cores, only AMD has its SOI (Silicon-On-Insulator) where Intel simply refused to believe that SOI was better than a strained silicon design.

Intel tried all it could to squeeze as much money out of Netburst, but when Dothan laptop CPUs were simply able to kill the desktop versions it was time to put this to bed. Intel's Core architecture made its debut not on the desktop but on the Laptop and mobile platforms, with the Core Solo and Core Duo really making a name for themselves in the initial stages, so much so that it made sense for desktop boards to be developed which could run these mighty quick and efficient CPUs.

Soon after came the desktop variants with a few more perks added such as extra cache, faster speeds and higher thermal envelopes, though it still managed to keep well below its Netburst counterparts.

Core 2 CPUs are the big thing these days, really sticking it to the AMD Athlon 64 family. For the most part the 266MHz (or 1066MHz quad pumped) FSB has been the big power behind the success of the Core 2, now Intel has upped this to 333Mhz (or 1333QDR).

Today we are testing out the high-end Core 2 Extreme QX6850 along with some other processors to see if the 1333MHz FSB offers a noticable performance increase over the usual 1066MHz parts.