W
hen it came time to choose our CPU, Intel
made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. OK, so
Luca Brasi didn’t hold a .38 to our temple,
but when you compare the 3GHz quad-core Core
2 Extreme QX6850 ($1,000, http://www.intel.com) to every
other publicly available CPU, the choice is obvious.
It mows down the benchmarks and the competi-
tion—including AMD’s vaunted quadfather—like it’s
the St. Valentine’s Day massacre.
Although our Dream Machine’s CPU is new, it’s
similar to what you’ve seen before. It has the same
8MB of L2 cache, the same Core microarchitecture,
and the same socket support as the Core 2 QX6800.
The main difference is the front-side bus, which runs
natively at 1,333MHz instead of a mere 1,066MHz.
Remember, the cores communicate via the FSB, so
that added bandwidth is welcome.
For DM ’07, we overclocked the stock 3GHz chip
to 3.66GHz. Although the QX6850 doesn’t clock up
like its lesser siblings (low-end chips tend to over-
clock farther than top-bin chips), we’re still talking
about speeds well in excess of 3GHz. That’s some
blazingly fast number crunching.D
ream Machine is all about going hog wild,
but we do show some restraint when
excess has no bearing on performance.
Case in point: We could have easily slotted 4GB
of RAM into this year’s Dream rig, but why? We’re
not convinced that having 4GB of main system
RAM with a 32-bit OS is even useful, as you won’t
be able to access all of it. The 2GB we do use
comes from Corsair’s award-winning Dominator
series ($610, http://www.corsair.com). It gives us the
Corsair reputation in addition to a couple of wick-
ed black heat spreaders.Intel Core 2 Extreme
QX
1,333MHz front-side bus fi nally arrives
in the new 3GHz chipCPU
MEMORY
2 MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCCSEPTEMBER 2007
D R E A M M A C H I N E 2 0 2 0 2 0 2 0 2 0 2 0 0 7
Corsair Dominator
10000
A controversial RAM decision: Is
2GB dreamy?