Gaming
Although Quad FX is supposed to be much more than a gaming rig, there's no denying that it must be good in this area to succeed. As we already explained, however, we encountered significant problems with the NVIDIA SLI setup AMD supplied, so we switched to a single ATi Radeon X1900XTX.
Running Far Cry at a low 1024 x 768, so the CPU is the limiting factor, shows that Quad FX really can't compete with Core 2 in gaming, at least not in the early technical preview form we were testing.
It's a similar story with Quake 4 at the same resolution. Curiously, the Athlon 64 FX-62 gets more benefit from turning SMP on than the Quad FX. Surely, this is another sign of the NUMA gremlins.
When you crank up the resolution, however, the CPU becomes far less significant, and there's not much to distinguish between any high-end processor, with or without SMP.
Likewise, there's little between any high-end CPU in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, although Core 2 processors still have the edge, and the Quad FX lags behind the FX-62.
