Team Germany: CPU And Motherboard
The 65 nm quad core offers a total of 8 MB L2 cache and runs at a 2.40 GHz clock speed on a FSB1066 bus. The Core 2 Quad Q8200 runs at 2.33 GHz on FSB1333, but only has 4 MB L2 cache total. The fully featured quad-core Q9300 runs 2.5 GHz on FSB1333 and comes with 6 MB L2 cache. As you will see in the benchmark section, the 2.40 GHz quad-core provides substantial performance benefits in applications that are optimized for multi-core processors, but it also requires substantially more power.
If you don’t care about power consumption, you can go ahead and overclock the 2.40 GHz Core 2 Quad Q6600 to 3.0 GHz by simply raising the bus speed from FSB1066 to FSB1333 on any overclocking-friendly motherboard.
Motherboard: Asus P5QL-SE
While the US team went for a P45 motherboard by Gigabyte, Germany decided to use a P43 model by Asus. The P5QL-SE is an entry-level motherboard, but the differences between the P43 and the P45 are few: the P43 cannot run DDR3 memory faster than DDR3-1066 speeds, and it may not distribute its 16 PCI Express 2.0 lanes across two physical x16 slots. Since we’re not out for a hardcore gaming machine, though, the choice is reasonable.
The Asus P5QL is a bit cheaper than the Gigabyte EP45-DS3L that our US team selected. Asus provides three classic PCI slots, while Gigabyte offers two. Asus utilizes the ICH10 southbridge with four SATA/300 ports; Gigabyte has six ports. Both offer an additional UltraATA/133 controller, HD audio and Gigabit networking. The Asus P5QL-SE has only two instead of four DIMM sockets, though. This is probably not an issue, as both systems are equipped with a pair of 2 GB DDR2 DIMMs, but you should keep this in mind.
