Science Mark 2.0 is an attempt to put the truth behind benchmarking. In an attempt to model real world demands and performance, SM2 is a suite of high-performance benchmarks that realistically stress system performance without architectural bias.  Science Mark 2.0 is comprised of 7 benchmarks, each of which measures a different aspect of real world system performance.

Pov-Ray s a high-quality, totally free tool for creating stunning three-dimensional graphics. It is available in official versions for Windows, Mac OS/Mac OS X and i86 Linux. The source code is available for those wanting to do their own ports. We used Pov-Ray 3.7beta15 for all tests, since it supports Dual Core CPUs. We used the build-in benchmark as suggested from developers.

Two different benchmarks, two different behaviours:

• In Pov-Ray, the performance difference is stunning! The QX6700 is 80% faster than the XE6800 and 121% faster than the E6600.
• In ScienceMark, the XE6800 holds first place and is 7.11% faster than the QX6700.

- Nero Digital

One of the major advantages of getting a Quad Core CPU would be to encode Video. Nero Digital is one of the best known Digital formats, offering both ASP and AVC encoder profiles.

For our tests, we used the latest version of Nero Recode, v2.3.1.8 as packaged in Nero Reloaded v7.5.0.1. As a source, we used a VOB file of 5mins duration. We encoded in two modes (ASP, AVC) for each processor, with exactly the same preferences (same bitrate and dual pass). The encoding time displayed below, is what Nero Recode reported. The lower the time taken, the better. All results are displayed in seconds.

It seems Nero Recode is not yet optimized for the Quad-Core. In the ASP profile, the Intel XE6800 was 9 seconds faster than the QX6700. However, in AVC encoding, the QX6700 showed its strength and saved us 102 secs. The differences in performance are not as good as we would have expected, but then again, a future build of Nero Recode for Quad-Core utilization could fix this.