Intel 'Yorkfield' 45 Nm quadcore , q9450

[BrainEater]

I just got my new processor , I thought I'd do a mini-review of it for yaz...

The beast in question is the Intel Q9450 .This is a 45 Nm quadcore (yorkfield) running at 1333Mhz FSB , 4x 2.667 Ghz , 12 Meg L2 cache.
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The test system :
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Asus Maximus formula motherboard , bios 1201
2x1Gb Mushkin enhanced pc6400 , 2x512 Mushkin enhanced pc6400 (total 3Gb , dual channel)
BFG 88oo GTX , 768 Mb ram
Secondary monitor on Nvidia Geforce FX5500 PCI
OS drive :WD raptorX 150GB
Pagefile :WD raptor36 Gb
Data drives 3x WD 500 Gb and 1x 320 Gb ide
Silverstone Strider 750watt PSU
Thermalright xp90c heatsink
Windows Xp/sp2+(everything but sp3:))

Here's the full chip specs :

CPU Socket Type : LGA 775
Core : Yorkfield
Name : Core 2 Quad Q9450
Operating Frequency : 2.66GHz
FSB : 1333MHz
L2 Cache : 12MB
Manufacturing Tech : 45 nm
64 bit Support : Yes
Hyper-Threading Support : No
Virtualization Technology Support : Yes
Multimedia Instruction : MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4, EM64T
Voltage : 0.85V – 1.3625V
Thermal Power : 95W

Here's a photo of the chip :

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Onto some numbers :

Here's the stock cpu-z ;


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3dmark 2006 , default settings , 1280x1024 , stock clocks on cpu ;


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Four instances of superpI ;


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CPU usage 100 % ;



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It doesnt matter whether you run 1 instance of superpi across all 4 cores , or run 4 instances , 1 one each.....it's 17 seconds for 1M calculation.;
Here's 2 cores , assigned affinity to 1 core each ;



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Sisoft Sandra benches : Comparison against top processors from AMD and Intel , including the processor I am upgrading from , the Intel e6600.



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I wasn't sure I'd notice the upgrade that much or not from the e6600 ,but wow , I'm impressed.
Boot time is down 4 seconds .
Pretty much everything works faster.
I'm still working on the baseline numbers , more data to follow.
Also , while I generally don't OC my main rig , I'll be doing some quicky OC's just for a lark ,and more data.

More soon.

[enaberif]

Most of what you think is faster is all in the mind.

There won't be THAT much difference from the e6600 to the quad and the reason for that is 90% of the stuff you run on a day to day basis will not take advantage of that quad.

Things like the raptor drives, memory speeds and motherboard will play more of a role than anything.

[DK2]

Good stuff, I want to get mine going, but I gotta wait.
How's the temps?

[tzetsin]

Most of what you think is faster is all in the mind

I'm going to have to disagree with you on this one, i've also got a Q9450 and i can attests to it being much speedier than the Q6600. I've got no pictures to back up my claims but i've done alot of benchies with both on the same test bed.

My Striker 2 formula doesnt like the Q9450 overly much and because i was leaving town with a pc i just built (that included the Q9450) i was forced to pull my Q6600 out of my P5K and hit the road.

In the few times i was able to get the Q9450 stable on the Striker i was able to get a few 3d mark benchies with SLI turned on, best score i got with the Q9450 running with a slight overclock to 2700 (the only way i was able to get stable enough to boot windows) was a touch over 14000 (ram and vid cards stock clocks) While i've had a few weeks to tweek the system now with the Q6600 and i've overclocked the proc to 3080mhz and the ram to 514mhz ( in cpu-z, 1050mhz in bios... not sure what makes the difference) I've never been able to break 13500 marks. Even the sandra cpu benchies were quite a bit better.

Like i said, i was having such a difficult time getting the proc stable with a very limited time to work on it that taking screenies were far from my mind, so you'll just have to take our word that this new proc is most definatly faster, clock for clock than the Q6600

[belgolas]

Originally Posted by enaberif

Most of what you think is faster is all in the mind.

There won't be THAT much difference from the e6600 to the quad and the reason for that is 90% of the stuff you run on a day to day basis will not take advantage of that quad.

Things like the raptor drives, memory speeds and motherboard will play more of a role than anything.

That may be true but there are a few games that will benefit greatly and not to mention that you can be playing a game that is taking up 2 cores while the rest is on the other 2 cores. Like if you want burn a dvd while playing a game is possible with a quad core.

[BrainEater]

Originally Posted by enaberif

Most of what you think is faster is all in the mind.

Heh...you might be right .

4 second improvement on boot , 4 seconds on superpi .That's good enough for me.....I'll see what other 'real world' benches I can do.....This is a work in progress.

Temps ?

Right now CPU idle temp is 26c , MB/NB/SB are 41 ish....

I had a pic but my camera's being difficult.....

I'm working on the 100% load pics too..

[sswilson]

I see this argument all of the time WRT gaming, but not everybody uses their computers for gaming applications all of the time.

I prefer quads (you wouldn't know it by my sig right now, but check back on the 27'th :) ) because I like to fold 24/7 and I like the fact that the < 10% free processing power left over still allows me to do everything I want from ripping CDs, streaming my media content, surfing, and heaven forbid... running productivity apps like OpenOffice and Paint.net all at the same time while still having a computer which seems damn near as speedy with all of that stuff running at 100% of its requirements as it does running only one of the apps.

[tzetsin]

Just a trick for you Mr. Brain, if you create a 20 gig partition on your raptor for the OS you'll get (most) of the full effects of the 80mb/s speeds of the drive without having to constantly run a defragger that'll optimise it for you. The drawback is that disk benchies will report slower than normal read/write times because they report on a drive level and not a partition level... but YOU will most certainly feel the difference ;)

[Wankerfx]

Wooohoo! Can't wait to see some overclocking.

The WR for this chip is sadly ~4.2Ghz, so I think you can pull it off =)

[BrainEater]

Sorry no updates on this yet.I'm working too much.Gotta pay if yah wanna play.

I dug a hole 4' x 3' x 9' deep today (with a shovel) and paid for half this proc anywayz.



I'll get some OC's up soon I promise.