Intel Q9450 vs Phenom 9850 - ATI HD3870 X2

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Give me an Intel Rig and i sure will . And again the FSB does not limit bandwidth wise, it all depends on the prefetcher and how well its actually working.

The benchmark doesn't appear to be limited by the FSB, memory latency or cache size since the 2.4GHz/2MB L2/800MHz FSB E4600 beats the 2.33GHz/4M L2/1333MHz FSB E6550.

"Wrong" Data in the Cache (simplyfied) -> accessing memory -> high latency -> bad coherency -> bad performance

This isn't a prefetcher issue, it's an issue within the core itself. The Core 2 has some problems with data that isn't aligned to a nice power of 2 value, causing it to take far longer to load than if the data was aligned. Even if the Core 2 had an IMC, it wouldn't help at all.