Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0:

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 3MP photographs taken in a variety of surroundings using the batch file processing function in the Elements Editor. We performed all of the auto fixes, including Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Colour and Sharpen before resizing the image to 640x480 and saving as a high quality JPEG.

The QX6700 was six seconds faster than the equally clocked dual-core E6700 chip – that’s a reasonably small performance improvement, but a performance improvement nonetheless. However, the performance improvement wasn’t substantial enough for the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 to outperform the dual-core X6800.

Xvid Encoding:

We tested video encoding performance using VirtualDub-MPEG version 1.6.15 and a multithreaded version of the Xvid codec, along with the LAME MT MP3 encoder for encoding audio. We did a two-pass encode of a 15-minute 276MB digital TV recording with a target file size of 100MB.

The Xvid codec isn’t the finest example of a multithreaded video codec, but it is one of the more popular codecs because it is free. During preliminary testing with DivX 6.2.2 and Windows Media Encoder 9, we have witnessed healthy performance improvements as a result of moving to quad-core. Unfortunately though, we didn’t complete the benchmark development and bug testing in time for this particular review.