DailyTech has managed to snag an Intel Kentsfield Core 2 Quadro Q6600 for some in-house testing. The Kentsfield Core 2 Quadro Q6600 is clocked at 2.4 GHz with a 1066 MHz front-side bus. It's equipped with 8MB of total L2 cache. Unlike Intel's Conroe Core 2 Duo processors, the cache configuration of the Core 2 Quadro Q6600 is 2x4MB with each set of dual-cores sharing a single 4MB pool of L2 cache. Here's a bit:

Gaming performance is as expected of quad-core. It offers nearly the same performance clock for clock as its dual core counterparts. Quake 4 with the latest patch is supposedly optimized for multi-threading shows minimal performance gains. The higher clocked Core 2 Extreme X6800 still manages to beat out the Core 2 Quadro Q6600 though. Games that aren't multi-threaded such as Serious Sam II shows little to no difference in performance.

Overall Intel's Kentsfield performs as expected. It will scale very well in multi-threaded applications such as 3D Studio Max, Cinebench and other 3D modeling applications or encoding applications. Unfortunately, unless the application is multi-core aware or optimized for multi-threading the performance gains are minimal if not absent. While the move to quad-core hardware may be exciting, software support is still trailing behind. Although Intel positions its quad-core Kentsfield Core 2 processors as a high-end part, the soon to be released Kentsfield Core 2 Extreme QX6700 and Core 2 Quadro Q6600 appear to be a better mid-range workstation part rather than enthusiast gamer part�especially since there's very little overlap with the Intel Xeon 3200 series.