Would love to get one of these, but no guarantees it would be compatible with my D975XBX2, even with recent firmware. Would be nice to know if anyone has tried it; otherwise I'd be limited to a Q6600 or an E8400 for upgrade choices, which both work.

I'd like to see how this chip performs clock-for-clock against a Q6600. My Q6600 hit 3.2 GHz on stock voltage, and it has more cache than the Q9300...

When you said: "given that pretty much all recent Penryn chips we've overclocked have topped out around 3.2GHz" do you mean quad based CPU's or the Penryn core in general. I ask only because I was able to hit 3.6Ghz at standard voltage and now run 4.5Ghz with a voltage bump, on air.

Ok, to the folks who really aren't any good at math here: http://techreport.com/articles.x/14573/16

Now onward:

Q9300 = ~300$
Q9450 = ~350$

Those are the prices I was looking at roughly a week ago. That's where I'm getting the 50$ difference. If it's 18 million ringgit difference at your local shop, that's fine, means nothing to me, and that's why my pricing advice means nothing to you. Of course, your pricing info in ringgit means even less to even more people. Ok??

Now, on to performance.

Q9300 at 2.500 TF2: 90.7fps
Q9450 at 2.666 TF2: 103.1fps
Q9300 at 3.262 TF2: 111.9 fps

So in 750MHz the Q9300 picked up 20fps. That means that if performance is linear, the Q9300 only manages to match the Q9450 performance at 2.875GHz. You've used up a decent amount of your OCing headroom just to even up the starting line for the race.

I'd also bet that Q9450/Q9300 will have similar top MHz limits. Those ridiculously low multipliers also mean your mobo is almost certain to crap out and die before your CPU hits it's stride.

Anyways, it's pretty clear that even with MHz completely out of the picture, the Q9450 is just plain faster. Do NOT start throwing e6XXX or e8XXX up as examples of why more L2 does nothing. The situation is ENTIRELY different. With Intel's quads, you have two fully independant cores on one package. Why does that matter? They share just one FSB. That means that each CPU is only getting at best 50% of the bandwidth that an otherwise identical single-die dual core CPU would be getting. That 1333 or 1600 FSB is acting like a 666 or 800MHz FSB. Having twice as much cache keeps the CPU from running out of work as often. That's why the Q9300 needs almost 200MHz head start to match performance.

It's really really simple. Multi-CPU = needs more cache. That wasn't true with current Xeons and all Opterons, since they use multiple FSBs (or equivalent links).

If you're doing pure CPU work, the situation is far prettier for the Q9300, but multimedia work and gaming involves lots and lots of bits flying around, and the quads are just starving with 3MB per die. 4MB was probably plenty, 6MB is happy excess, 3MB is a little bit light.

You'll notice Intel never bothered making those 2MB per quads. They would have asphyxiated, I tell you.

Also, MMO: My purchase of a Q9450 is pretty irrelevant. It's another result, not the cause. I bought a Q9450 because it has the best price/performance of the current generation. I was actually considering selling it and going back to my Q6600, since the performance difference wasn't very large. The larger caches deliver nice clock-for-clock improvements, as does the Penryn design. It's also cooler at 3.2 than my Q6600 was at 2.4. My cheerleading for the Q9450 has everything to do with it being a great CPU.

While the Q9300 is in no way bad, I think the 50$ you save (after already spending 300$) isn't really in your best interests. The performance delta is larger than the pricing delta.

Man, I really want to pick up a good quad core combo, and really want an AMD setup, but it is hard to ignore these results.

I will wait as long as possible to try and support AMD. I don't mind a little less speed if the price is right, so if they can drop one of the X4 B3 Phenoms to $150 or so, I'll pick it up along with a MSI K9A2 Platinum motherboard.
(Quad core CPU + a "board with four second-gen PCIe x16 slots, a board capable of three- and four-way CrossFire X config" for $300 seems like a better deal then the $266-$300 spend on just a Q9300.

I have 4 x 2GB sticks of DDR2 already, and am just waiting for the right time to pull the trigger.

Thanks for another fine review TR.
I

Looks like a sweet chip for new builds, but I wouldn't give up a good clocking G0 Q6600 for Q9300 at all. 3.6Ghz on Q6600 is entirely doable and is actually average, and I'd happily put my bets on the 3.6Ghz chip holding it's own against the 3.2Ghz with less L2 Q9300.

The Q6600 and Q9300 have the same sockets right? So they'll work in the same mobos, correct?

SSE4 is so awesome.

I know it's a stupid question but... In 2010 will we be still talking about processors at 3 GHz? I understand the Megahertz rate has ended, but we've really been stuck at the same speed for 6 years (in 2002 I had the new Pentium 4 at 2,5 GHz), of course the new processors are faster etc... but yawn...

Please, if you are going to supply folding benchmarks then also include SMP WU's which is what the vast majority of folders with quad cores run rather than 4 instances of a single processor WU.

there should be more testing with a bunch of programs running at one time. that's how you use multiple cores.. not from one piece of software that is multi-threaded.

real life scenarios are... running sql server locally & visual studio.. edit + compile, while win-amp runs in the background.. and probably a couple explorer windows open.

now, while all that is happening.. you suddenly realize you need to copy a db to your local computer & unzip it.

the benchmark is unzipping while continuing to run all the other programs. how long does it take to unzip under those conditions?

... oh.. and right in the middle of unzipping, the automated backup program suddenly decides to run. yay!

Just got a Q9300 and I'm using it over a Q6700.

Runs cooler and the bios can handle temp control better.

Even though the Q6700 was running 3.4G+ vs

the Q9300 @ ~3.1G .

Letting it run for awhile until I make up my mind.

Fry's had a sale on G0 Q6600's for $179.99 that ended today, picked one up to replace my E6600.

More and more, I believe you are running into designed clock speed walls in your overclocking attempts.

As power management becomes ever more important at smaller process sizes, chip makers seem to be tuning each type of transistor to run at a well defined range of frequencies.

This may be why your increased voltage seems to have little effect.

So the OCing headroom on the q9300 and x3320 are about the same at ~3.2ghz, but what about the q9450? higher stock speeds typically indicate higher bins right? This review was great, but does anyone have info on where the q9450/x3350 top out at?

Every CPU review I see just makes me feel more secure in my decision to go with an E6600 and just OC the crap out of it. Current software just isn't giving Quads enough to work with.

And the Q9300@3.2 doesn't beat the Q9450 at stock by all that much. Don't be cheap; it doesn't pay. When you're dropping 300$ on a CPU, why not add the last 50$ and get double the cache and noticable performance increase??

Increasing the clock speed helps, but both CPUs can do that. The Q9450's larger caches don't seem to mean much of anything WRT OCing headroom or heat output, and the performance *is* there.

Q9450 FTW.

Interesting to see these new 45nm processors all seemingly top out at ~3.2GHz. I remember reading early reports of e8400 going to 3.6GHz with relative ease and some even making it to 4GHz. Perhaps those were just bootable, but not stable speeds. The 65nm line didn't seem to have this hard limit either. I've read of many Q6600 operating at 3.4GHz 24/7 without issue.

I wonder if Intel is building in a limit to make their QX series more palatable for those interested in the highest OC...

I've said it before and I'll say it again: a large part of the reason I read TechReport is the writing. You've delivered again! Thank you.

I wonder why Damage is not using Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance as a benchmark?

My system gets better simulation scores with it.

The best thing about this review is that I now have a reference for the difference between "turd brown" and "poop brown." That's been bothering me for a while.

Intel hasn't officially introduced the E7200 yet, so we don't have exact pricing, but rumors on the Intarweb peg its price at $137 and its launch date as April 20th.

Fraudzilla's newsbit is pretty new, so who knows, they might be right (for once). However, VR-Zone and HKEPC (who tend to be right much more often than those rejects [Fraudzilla] from the rejects [The Inquirer] from a tech tabloid [The Ragister]) say it's May 11.

http://www.vr-zone.com/articles/Intel_Desktop%2C_Mobile_%26_Server_...
http://www.hkepc.com/?id=797&fs=nchh
(Translation: http://209.85.135.104/translate_c?hl=en&langpair=zh%7Cen&u=http://w... )

The Core 2 Quad Q9300 is Intel's most affordable quad-core processor, and it promises to supplant a long-time favorite of ours, the Core 2 Quad Q6600, by offering additional goodness at the exact same price.

Speaking of April 20, that's when the Q6700 is meant to drop to $266 and the Q6600 to $224. So two days from now onward, the Q6700 will be the pricewise competitor to the Q9300, this time gaining an advantage of 1 MiB per core and 166 MHz in clock speed (rather than a 100 MHz clock speed deficit, as with the Q6600). This leaves the Q9300 with just the advantages of FSB bandwidth (1333 MT/s vs 1066 MT/s) and microarchitecture (Penryn vs Kentsfield). That will be interesting, indeed.

i'll be honest and say i didn't read it all word for word.
so i might have missed something along the way.
...but why is there a B on the q6600 benchmark?:
http://www.techreport.com/r.x/core2-quad-q9300/folding-total.gif

In fact, the Q9300's toughest competition may come in the form of the Core 2 Duo E8500. Are two faster cores better than four slower ones?

I'd personally rather grab an 8500 or 8400 and overclock it. As Damage said himself: software has been frustratingly slow to progress toward more threads It's been very slow, painfully slow, mockingly slow.

Hopefully by the time I'm ready for a new rig all that will have changed.

the real competition is between the 9300 and q6600 ,the e8500/e8400 is for games.
the smaler cacher is noting in real world applications , if you need a bigger cache buy a AMD proceesor.
the q6600 is going down at 20 april at $225 so is a hard choise.
for overclocking buy a x4 9850 or a QX9xxx .

No VT/TXT on the E7200 I guess?

Prices are still inflated around $50 on the Q9300 from what I can see locally, but thanks to ASUS my mobo has a BIOS for the 45nm chips now. w00t

Yikes,here's the article you link to when AMD fanboys are getting noisy.
A cold look at the numbers have Phenom and its buddies getting totally pwned.
Both the Q9450 and the 8500 are awesome,as is the new 9300.
Good times indeed for Intel fans :)

Man, that chart would look great if it scaled to a wider screen width. ;)

Smells like more GTL+ and northbridge voltage tweaking is needed to see how far the processors will overclock? That's what I keep hearing-- you need to be much more fine-grained about it with the 45nm Core 2 Quads.