Of course this latest batch of chips utilizes a faster 1333MHz bus speed (we reviewed the first of these chips here) and there are a couple of options for motherboards to support this bus. NVIDIA’s nForce 680-series provides full support of the 1333MHz bus and gives an extra boost to graphics performance if you’re using an NVIDIA GPU as well - additionally, you can do SLI on them. Intel’s latest P35 chipset supports this adjusted bus speed as well and comes with the legendary Intel stability that’s become the hallmark of the industry.

The widespread availability of motherboards supporting this new faster bus speed should make it no problem finding a board for yourself to run one of the new Core 2 Duo’s for yourself.

What the QX6850 really does is help galvanize Intel as the preeminent leader in quad-core technology and should help bolster developer support as we see the industry move towards more CPU cores. id Software's leading guy, John Carmack, told us this regarding his feelings of CPU cores and physics:

“I am not a believer in dedicated PPUs.  Multiple CPU cores will be much more useful in general, but when GPUs finally get reasonably fine grained context switching and scheduling, some tasks will work well there.”
-John Carmack

From that, we can see that CPU roles in gaming will become even more prevalent so it’s easy to see why Intel is shuffling a lot of resources at multi-core technology.

The QX6850’s design is setup with a package that contains four distinct CPU cores with each core sporting 2 Megabytes of cache for a combination of 8 Megabytes. This cache is non-exclusive and each core – if needed – can access up to all 8 Megabytes of it. A 9x multiplier of the 333MHz bus gives a default clock speed of 3 Gigahertz, however, we found that with a bit of tinkering we could easily get it up to 3.6GHz using a Thermaltake V1 CPU cooler – a heatpipe cooler using active cooling. Getting the bus speed of our XFX 680iLT board to 400MHz was a piece of cake and we know if you want to get into adjusting the voltage at all, you can easily get more speed from this chip.

It’s TDP-rating (Thermal Design Power) hasn’t changed much at all from past parts carrying the “Extreme” moniker which means that your current setup may have no issues at all running a QX6850. We had idle temperatures of around 105 degrees and up to 135 degrees under a load – your results may vary, depending on the kind of CPU cooler you use.

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