Conclusions
You may have gathered that the Core 2 Extreme QX6800 is the fastest desktop processor that money can buy. No nuance is required to discuss this one. The QX6800 nearly swept our entire benchmark suite, and in many cases, it crushed its main rival, the Athlon 64 FX-74. As one test result showed us, Intel's new top quad-core processor achieves nearly 15 times the performance of a 1GHz Pentium III. To an old-timer like me, that stat puts this beast into perspective perhaps more than any other. This thing is an absolute wonder of Moore's Law.

Having said that, I can't exactly recommend purchasing one of these to have as your own. The thing costs twelve hundred dollars, for crying out loud. And this time around, unlike many others, the new Extreme edition processor doesn't supplant its precursor. The Core 2 Extreme QX6700 lives on at $999, with an unlocked multiplier just like the QX6800. All you're really getting for the additional $200 is a slight bump in guaranteed clock speed. Both of 'em will probably hit at least 3.2GHz just fine, if our overclocking experience is anything to go by.

Then again, relative value may not be the most notable consideration in the realm of thousand-dollar CPUs.

Just make sure you don't take from our test results that you need a quad-core CPU today. Check our gaming test results again, in particular; few of today's games require even a high-end dual-core CPU to perform well. Yes, many of our tests showed big performance gains from going quad, but our benchmark suite was designed to show the potential of these processors. If you simply stick with more common applications, well, you may have trouble getting them to take full advantage of two cores, let alone four.

Unless, that is, you have a chimp, a priest, a rabbi, and a jar of peanut butter. Then it's a whole other story.