Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850

Intel's latest high-end, quad-core chip, the Core 2 Extreme QX6850, nudges past its QX6800 predecessor rather than taking a significant a leap forward. Moving from a 2.93GHz clock speed to 3.0GHz didn't result in tremendous performance gains on our benchmarks, nor did the switch to a faster frontside bus. Instead, the major appeal here is the price droP

For $999 (~£487), Intel's new chip delivers performance that's on par with the older, much pricier, QX6800. But remember that AMD and Intel each have new product lines coming out by the end of the year that might prove worth waiting for.

The 3.0GHz QX6850's progenitor, the 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6800, was actually not that widely available as a standalone product. If your PC has one, chances are it's because you purchased a complete system from a high-end system vendor. Still, with a suggested price of $1,200 (~£585) and a street price of $1,350 (~£659) at the time of this review, Intel's previous top-dog chip sat in a new category of expensive high-end CPUs.
For motherboards, the QX6850 uses the same LGA 775 design as the current generation of dual-core and quad-core CPUs, which means that you don't necessarily need a next-generation motherboard to use it. But unless you go with certain Intel G33, P35 or X38 chipset-based motherboards, or a BIOS-updated Nforce 600-series board from Nvidia, you won't get support for the faster 1,333MHz frontside bus. We used both Asus P5K and P5K3 motherboards for our testing, both based on Intel's P35 chipset, but the latter using the newer (and much pricier) DDR3 RAM.