Test Platform
The testbed was configured as follows:
- CPUs
- Pre-production Kentsfield CPU (8MB cache, 2.66GHz, 1066MHz FSB)
- Intel Core 2 Extreme CPU (4MB cache, 2.93GHz, 1066MHz FSB)
- Pre-production Intel BadAxe 2 D975XBX2 Rev.303 mainboard (BIOS BX97520J.86A.1446.2006.0913.9039)
- eVGA Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 graphics card (1GB memory)
- 2 x 1GB Corsair CM2X1024-8500C5 DDR2 1066 (5-5-5-15) set to DDR2 800 4-4-4-12 in the BIOS
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB HDD
- Microsoft Windows XP with SP2
I would like to stress once again that the tests were performed outside of our usual lab at the Intel IDF booth, therefore Intel engineers took the trouble to set the system. This is once of the main reasons why we insist on regarding the obtained results as preliminary.
This is what the system on Core 2 Extreme QX6700 looked like inside:
As I have already mentioned before it featured a new Intel D975XBX2 (BadAxe 2) mainboard.
The quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6700 processor is recognized by Windows XP Professional SP2 correctly and it sees it as four separate processors:
By the way, this is not a new picture for us. As you remember, we could see similar picture in systems with dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition on NetBurst micro-architecture. These processors had two physical cores and two virtual cores thanks to Hyper-Threading technology.
The CPU-Z utility version 1.36 is also familiar with Kentsfield:
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Everything is detected correctly except for the CPU name. It even detects the correct cache size that consists of two 4MB L2 caches of the Conroe processors used to build the Kentsfield.
