Intel certainly haven't been resting on their laurels. The extremely successful Core 2 launch was quickly met with quad core refreshes and recently they followed this up with the release of 1333 front side bus processors. Intel, yet again pushed the envelope and recently released a refresh of the Core 2 quad using a new core with enhanced specifications. Quite surprisingly for us before we could even get a review of the new QX9650 ready for publication the QX9770 sample arrived in our labs.

In this article we are going to take a look at the new QX9650 and QX9770 when compared to the existing QX6850 and ageing QX6700. Rather than benchmark the processors on the same configuration which has been done to death across the web we are going to approach this from a slightly different slant. Each of the processors will be tested with memory at a 1:1 ratio. So for the 9770 than means 1600MHZ, the 9650/6850 1333MHz and the 6700 with memory at 1066MHz. As well as providing a unique perspective on the performance of each CPU we also feel this method of testing closely matches memory configurations consumers will pair with each processor. At the end of the review we will analyse how various memory speeds impact the performance of each CPU, so if you want to know how the QX6700 with DDR2 compares to the new QX9650 with DDR2 we will provide the answers.