Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800

Hail the new king of desktop CPUs

THE ATHLON 64 FX has worn the desktop-CPU crown for over a year, but AMD’s pride and joy has finally met its match: Intel’s 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800. This new CPU surpasses the AMD chip on all of our benchmark tests.

The $999 X6800 sits at the top of Intel’s new Core 2 Duo family. In addition to the broad improvements delivered by the Core 2 architecture, the Core 2 Extreme has 4MB of unified L2 cache.

In our tests, the X6800 didn’t so much as wince. Its nearest competitor, AMD’s 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-62, came within 5 percent of the X6800 on our iTunes,multitasking, and Microsoft Office tests. On our Half-Life 2 and Adobe Photoshop CS2 tests, however, the AMD chip fell behind by as much as 28 percent.

The X6800 features more than just groundbreaking performance. The CPU has a thermal design power (TDP) rating of 65 watts, which allows for its use in smaller-profile PCs. (By comparison, Intel’s Pentium D 900 was rated between 95 and 130 watts). Plus, Intel made upgrading easy: Core 2 Duo chips can use the Socket LGA775 interface found on many
current Intel motherboards. And the X6800 is the only Core 2 chip whose clock multiplier comes unlocked—this means you can overclock it right out of the box. If you want to run the new CPU and a dual-graphics-card configuration, you’ll need to choose between two options. Intel’s 975 chipsets support ATI’s CrossFire dual-card technology; if you want to run a Scalable Link Interface (SLI) configuration, however, you’ll need a motherboard from nVidia’s nForce 500 Series for Intel.