Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 review: First look at Penryn

Gaming Performance

We did not expect to see any real performance gains here as most games are not yet quad-core optimized (or multi-core for that matter). Although we have not included any really new games, even the latest and greatest titles show no real advantages. At this point every quad-core gamer out there is banking on the fact that Crysis should fully support quad-core processors despite a total lack of evidence so far. Interestingly the QX9650 did show a slight performance advantage when compared to the QX6850, so perhaps that extra 4MB of cache is coming into play here.