Maxit Mag

If Kentsfield didn't impress you, we managed to get our hands on something that will. Dubbed Clovertown, Intel's new addition to it's Server CPU  lineup will be marketed as a Xeon. Featurng 4 physical cores and based on the Core 2 architecture, you'd probably be thinking what differentiates this from (boring?) old Kentsfield. Well for starts, it utilises the LGA 771 socket rather than the well known LGA 775 socket, so you can't give it a home in your gaming rig. OK, we admit that that's not the most interesting feature, so we'll tell you - Whilst Kentsfield CPUs will run in more or less all Core 2 Duo supporting motherboards, you can couple two Clovertown processors and create an incredible octal-core monster!!

Armed with two 2.66 GHz engineering samples, a SUPERMICRO X7DA8-O dual CPU motherboard and 2 Gigs of RAM, we enlisted the help of our favourite UC babe, Holly, and set out building our octal-core behemoth before running a series of benchmarks on it.

As can be seen in the CPUz screenshot, the processor has 4 Cores and 2 x 4 MB of L2 Cache per CPU just like Kentsfield. Infact, bar the different sockets and the ability to use 2 of these CPUs together, little differentiates it from Kentsfield.

To see just how Clovertown compared to Core 2 Duo and Kentsfield CPUs, we decided to run a series of tests. Read on to find out how it faired.