3D Games

Call Of Duty 2 appears to be limited primarily by graphics card performance. The Core 2 Extreme QX6850 gains nothing here from overclocking, but leads the Core 2 Duo E6750 at everything except its maximum overclock speed. A possible reason for slightly improved performance from two added but "unused" cores might be that the operating system offloaded a few background tasks to the Core 2 Extreme’s additional cores.

F.E.A.R. loves to get some extra CPU performance, and shows the Core 2 Duo E6750’s higher maximum clock speed in the leading position.

Quake 4 shows a virtual repeat of the performance gains seen in F.E.A.R., with the highest clock speed ruling the day. Also notice similar gains for the Core 2 Extreme E6850’s additional cores at 2.66 GHz and 3.00 GHz clock speeds. Quake 4 was one of the first dual-core optimized games, but those optimizations might extend slightly into four-core processors as well.

Applications

3D Studio Max gets an 80% performance boost from a 100% increase in processing cores, which is a great payback for the added expense of lesser-overclocking four-core processors.