Futuremark, formerly Mad Onion, is responsible for a series of benchmarks widely used among enthusiasts to gauge video card, processor and overall system performance. I selected and ran a few of their various programs, including 3DMark 2006 Basic Edition, 3DMark Vantage Professional Edition and PCMark 2005.


First up is 3DMark 2006 and, more specifically, the CPU Score. It's clear that this benchmark makes good use of all four cores on the Q9650 and seems to scale pretty well in terms of clock speed.


The same trend can be seen when looking at the overall 3DMark score as well.


Next up is the 3DMark Vantage CPU score which further emphasizes the power of all four cores at work.


The PCMark 2005 overall score shows much of the same. Unfortunately I only had the Basic Edition on hand which means I was not able to see the individual CPU Score.

I found it interesting in all of these tests that the E7200 @ 3.4 GHz was still not able to trump the slower clocked stock Q9750.

More just ahead...