The demands of enthusiasts are ever growing and the relative success of Intel’s Quad Core Platform would certainly verify this. Intel however are taking a bold step and are attempting to position their new Quad Core Xeon processors towards the high end enthusiast sector. This is not only in direct competition to AMD’s Quad FX release but to further meet the demands of a high end multitasking environment.

Today we are going to look at a pair of the new Quad Xeon X5365 processors running at 3.0ghz on a i5000X chipset.

Multi Core/Multi CPU

It wasn’t so long ago that even dual core was beyond the realities of many people, however today, multiple cores are firmly routed in the mainstream enthusiast market. The benefits of multicore are wide reaching, we can all enjoy faster response times and a more enjoyable multitasking environment. Even current consoles such as the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 use multicore technology to power their gaming experience.

The evolution of CPU development is such that, once dual core hit the masses, Intel already had released Quad Core processors for those with deeper pockets and higher demands. With multiple processors on Quad core architecture, it is clear to see where we are headed with all of this. How about future gaming titles with two cores handling the artificial intelligence, while other cores are left to deal with the everyday tasks?

AMD were the first to bring multiple CPU/Core to the public with their Quad FX platform, however the performance was sadly lacking and it was a rather poor implementation when compared with the single die Intel Quad. AMD stated that the dual socket desktop market had a strong future and they would continue evolving after the quad core processors on K10 were released.

However it is Intel who today have kindly supplied the (pre)review product on our bench. It can be traced back to the first demonstration at CES 2007 where it was codenamed V8. The particular setup we are looking at is an eight core desktop PC for media content creation.

“Combining Quad Core processing and the advantages of Intel Core Microarchitecture, a media creation PC with dual Quad Core Xeon Processors is ideal for processor intensive, digital media usage models – speeding tasks like video encoding and transcoding. 3D Animation rendering, music editing and more. Eight processing cores also take advantage of today’s operating systems improved workload scheduling when running multiple applications simultaneously. It’s multitasking capability makes this platform a great choice for developers and media enthusiasts who can compile code or encode video in the background while working on other tasks”.