Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 review

So, it's a tentative first outing for 45nm - but it can't yet be said that Intel has slipped up. In theory, the new process should allow clock speeds to be pushed higher than ever, while keeping power consumption within acceptable limits. We overclocked our test processor to 3.33GHz simply by increasing the clock multiplier from 9x to 10x, and with no further tweaking it ran perfectly stably.

The message from these first results is that if you have a current-generation quad-core CPU you won't gain much performance by upgrading, although you'll almost certainly get a more overclockable part. The first generation of Penryn is by no means a disaster, but big performance gains will only come once the higher-clocked parts that 45nm will allow are released.

Author: David Fearon