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.

Testbed and Testing Methodology

We used 3 different CPUs in total, 2 motherboards and 2 sets of RAM. Apart from that, our testbed was the same throughout. Here are the details of our setup:

Intel Core 2 Duo Setup

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66 GHz Engineering Sample
• ASUS P5B Deluxe motherboard
• 2 x 1 GB Team Xtreem PC2 5300 RAM

Intel Kentsfield Setup

• Intel Core 2 Quadro E6700 2.66 GHz Engineering Sample
• ASUS P5B Deluxe Motherboard
• 2 x 1 GB Team Xtreem PC2 5300 RAM

Intel Clovertown Setup

• 2 x Intel Xeon Clovertown 2.66 GHz Engineering Samples
• SUPERMICRO X7DA8-O Dual Socket 771 Intel 5000X Extended ATX Server Motherboard
• 2 x 1 GB Crucial ECC Registered PC2 5300 RAM

Common Hardware

• 512 MB Connect 3D X1900XTX Graphics Card
• 80 GB Maxtor Diamondmax 10 SATA Hard Drive
• Enermax Galaxy 1000W PSU

We'd like to mention that Intel didn't send us any engineering samples and that we obtained them through independent means.

We decided to run the following benchmarks on each setup:

Synthetic Benchmarks

SiSoft SANDRA CPU Arithmetic and Multimedia Benchmarks
SANDRA's CPU arithmetic and multimedia benchmarks are a good way to compare the general performance of a variety of processors.

3D Mark 06 (CPU Score)
The CPU test in 3D Mark 06 is very useful in providing information on how you will fair in games that are significantly dependant on processor performance.

Real-World Tests

MP3 Encoding
In today’s digital age, practically everyone owns an MP3 player. MP3 encoding is a fairly CPU intensive task and is benefited hugely by a faster processor. To do our test, we ripped Moby - Play from the original CD to MP3 files using Windows Media Player 10. We timed how long it took on each system using a stopwatch.

Archiving/File Compression
It's fairly common these days for us to compress files and folders to share or use for backup purposes. Like MP3 encoding, this is a CPU intensive task. We archived a base folder containing MP3s with a size of 280 MB into a .rar file using WinRAR 3.6. Again, the process was timed on each rig using a stopwatch.

Gaming Tests

Quake 4 and Unreal tournament 2004
To compare how the different rigs would compare in games, we ran time demos in Quake 4 and Unreal tournament 2004 and recorded the number of frames per second in each case.

The settings used were:

Quake 4 (v 1.2, dual-core patch)

• Resolution - 1024 x 768
• Video Quality - Normal
• Maxit's custom Time Demo

Unreal Tournament 2004

• Resolution - 1280 x 1024
• Demo - AS-Junkyard

Results

Synthetic Benchmarks