9. Summary And Conclusions

Our tests proved the obvious conclusion that we expected from the outset: namely, that the mix of tasks in DHCAT, and the consistent use of four separate tasks in the more demanding assessments in each DHCAT scenario confers a considerable advantage on a quad-core processor over its dual-core counterparts. That advantage is formidable, and produces the best DHCAT scores we’ve ever seen: 280 when running Vista, and 287 when running Windows MCE 2005 (XP). We don’t, however, see any compelling performance reasons to upgrade from XP to Vista just yet, especially in the relative absence of DX10-capable games and graphics applications (that will change in 2008, however, and we expect to be singing a different tune by the middle of next year).

But with the Intel quad-core QX6600 (Kentsfield, 65nm, 2.4 GHz, 8 MB L2 cache) readily available at prices from $275 to $325, and QX6700 (Kentsfield, 65 nm, 2.66 GHz, 8 MB L2 cache) going for $712 to $960, it stands to reason that you could garner the benefits of four cores for less than what a QX6800 or the new QX6850 will cost. If handling multiple media tasks is indeed something on your processing agenda, it may make sense to invest a little less money in older quad-core offerings, so as to watch what happens with AMD Barcelona and planned single-die quad-core offerings coming from Intel some time in the next quarter or two.

It takes a special mix of processing activities to justify more than two cores in a PC’s processor, but media multi-tasking, along with video editing or authoring, 3-D modeling and other thread-intensive applications do seem to benefit from the extra oomph a quad-core provides. DHCAT may be nobody’s idea of a "killer app," but it does indicate that more cores are better when it comes to handling lots of reasonably serious media-related multi-tasking.

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