You can see the performance results in the table below. Keep in mind that Core 2 Extreme X6800 runs at a higher clock rate (2.93 GHz) than Core 2 QX6700 (2,66 GHz). For DivX, Sony Vegas and 3ds Max the results are given in seconds, so the lower the better.

On the chart below you can see the performance difference between the two CPUs in percent. The chart indicates by how much Core 2 Extreme QX6700 is faster than Core 2 Extreme X6800.

As you can see the CPUs achieved similar performance on PCMark05 overall test suit. On 3DMark06 the performance difference between the two CPUs wasn’t big (7.60%), which does not surprise us at all, since 3D performance nowadays depends a lot on the video card being used. Also, keep in mind that the two CPUs run at different clock rates, Core 2 Extreme QX6700 running at 2.66 GHz while Core 2 Extreme X6800 runs at 2.93 GHz.

The performance difference on the 3DMark06 CPU test was impressive (60%), however this specific CPU performance increase does not necessarily translates into a higher 3D performance – as we mentioned, 3D performance measured by this program increased only 7.60%.

The real difference between the two CPUs is seen on programs that take advantage of symmetric multiprocessing, especially rendering. On 3ds Max the performance difference was over 60% and on POV-Ray we could see a stunning 80% performance increase. Video editing will also benefit a lot of quad-core CPUs, as Core 2 Extreme QX6700 was 50% faster than Core 2 Extreme X6800 here. Even MPEG decoding will be benefited by quad-core technology, as you can see.