Pc Hardware

The GTX 295, where do we start? - I have to say this is one card that I find myself getting quite excited about. The main reason for that is because I know it's going to be the fastest graphics card on the market. How do I know this, though? It's not actually because we know what the specifications of the card are or anything like that. The reason I know it's going to be the fastest graphics card on the market is because it literally has to be!

No matter what, this card can't be slower than the HD 4870 X2; the other thing is it can't just be a bit faster than the HD 4870 X2 either, considering how long ATI has held the performance crown for now.

UNRIVALED GRAPHICS PERFOMANCE

With the power of two GeForce GTX 200 GPUs on a single card, the GeForce GTX 295 graphics card delivers unrivaled graphics performance in the hottest games including Far Cry 2, Mirrors Edge, and Call of Duty 5: World at War. Combining two GeForce GTX 295 graphics cards in Quad NVIDIA® SLI® configuration takes gaming performance to extreme levels delivering breathtaking frame rates and total graphics bliss!!!

EXPERIENCE GRAPHICS PLUS

The GeForce GTX 295 graphics card with CUDA technology not only provides a world-class gaming experience, it also delivers Graphics Plus. Experience jaw-dropping PhysX gaming effects, stereoscopic 3D, and lightning fast video and image processing all accelerated by the GPU. Whether it's experiencing a new world of realistic physical motion and massively destructible environments, strapping on your NVIDIA® GeForce® 3D Vision%u2122 glasses to game in true stereoscopic 3D, transcoding HD videos in minutes to your portable video player1, or rapidly editing digital images using Adobe CS4, the GeForce GTX 295 graphics card does it all with mind blowing performance.

I won't dwell too long on the specifics of the Core 2 Extreme QX6700. This product, which lived its early life going by the code-name Kentsfield, really is two Core 2 Duo chips mounted together on the same package.Intel has used this multi-chip packaging technique in the past to create "dual-core" processors, such as the "Presler" Pentium D. Lashing together two separate chips rather than making one large chip makes good sense from an economic standpoint, because smaller die areas tend to make for higher yields of good chips from each wafer.

The result of this multi-chip fusion is a processor that plugs into a regular LGA775-style socket and packs four processing cores alongside a total of 8MB of L2 cache. Cosmetically, it looks for all the world like any other recent Intel desktop CPU.

The Core 2 Extreme QX6700 runs at 2.66GHz on a 1066MHz front-side bus, so its clock speed matches that of the second fastest Core 2 Duo, the E6700. (The Core 2 Extreme X6800 is the fastest at 2.93GHz.) Intel probably chose not to push any harder on clock speed in order to keep the QX6700 inside of a reasonable power envelope. The E6700's thermal rating, or TDP, is 65W, while the X6800's is 75W. Fittingly, the QX6700's TDP is exactly twice that of the E6700 at 130W. That's quite enough heat production for a desktop processor, and Intel has already established a 130W thermal envelope for Pentium Extreme Edition CPUs that use this same LGA775 infrastructure.

In fact, the QX6700 should be compatible with many existing Core 2-compatible motherboards via nothing more than a BIOS update. Some mobo makers have already published compatibility lists for Kentsfield. Then again, Intel says previous revisions of its own D975XBX "BadAxe" mobo aren't designed for use with the QX6700, so nothing is certain. You'll want to check with the motherboard maker to ensure compatibility before taking the plunge.

Because the QX6700 is an Extreme Edition processor, it comes with a customarily robust price tag of $999 and an unlocked upper multiplier to facilitate easy overclocking. Intel also plans to introduce a less expensive Core 2 Quad Q6600 CPU at some point in the first quarter of next year. That product will run at 2.4GHz and have a TDP rating of 105W.

QUAD-CORE'S PERFORMANCE CHALLENGES

The Core 2 Extreme QX6700 may be the apex of awesomeness in processors today, but it does face some formidable performance challenges, both due to its own nature and because of external factors. As a multi-chip package, the QX6700 contains two copies of a relatively well-integrated dual-core design. The two cores on each chip share a 4MB L2 cache between them, complete with dynamic partitioning and the ability to hand off ownership of data from one core to the next. Unfortunately, the integration between the QX6700's two chips is less than ideal.

Although they occupy the same package, their only means of communication is the system's front-side bus. The two chips must coordinate to ensure the sanity of the contents of their respective L2 caches via this bus. That will sometimes mean writing modified data out of one chip's cache into main memory and then reading it back into the other chip's cache-a positively eternal operation in CPU time. Both chips use this same bus to talk with the rest of the system, including main memory and I/O devices. Also, the presence of three electrical loads on the bus-two CPU chips and the core-logic chipset's north bridge-complicates matters. Someone looking to overclock his system's FSB may find less success with a Core 2 Quad or QX6700 than with a standard-issue Core 2 Duo.

If all of that sounds complex, just wait until you dig into the software issues. In order to take advantage of multi-core processors, software applications must execute by means of multiple threads. Today, very few games and not many other applications are multithreaded. We do try to take advantage of multithreaded applications when possible in our CPU test suite, but that's more difficult to do for four cores than for two. Many of the early optimizations for multi-core processors only use two threads, so their performance benefits are fully realized on a dual-core CPU.