Like any solution with four CPU cores, the Core 2 Extreme QX6700's effectiveness depends on what you feed it. Give it a nicely parallelizable task with four or more threads, and it will utterly embarrass former top dogs like the Core 2 Extreme X6800 and the Athlon 64 FX-62. For applications like video encoding, 3D rendering, image processing, and scientific computing, the QX6700 trumps all other desktop processors-and, I suspect, a great many dual-socket Opteron workstations. 3DMark06's multithreaded CPU test gives us a glimpse of how multithreaded gaming might look, and the QX6700 performs very well there, too.

Feed it a simple app with only one or two threads, though, and this quad-core monster begins to look an awful lot like a Core 2 Duo E6700 with higher power consumption and a much steeper price tag. Of course, even that isn't a horrible place to be. In single- and dual-threaded applications, the QX6700 still wallops the Athlon 64 FX-62 nearly across the board, with similar power requirements and heat output. That fact simply underscores how good the Core 2 lineup truly is.