"Last week, we took a look at the so-called "budget minded" Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 desktop processor. Okay, it may be slapped with the 'budget' tag, but it certainly isn't budget performance -- our benchmarks indicate that it performed on an average of 2-5% better than the previous generation's midrange E6600 CPU, yet retails for only roughly $140 -- not to mention that it overclocks very decently. Today, we'll examine something on the other end of the spectrum -- the second fastest consumer desktop processor offered by Intel. So far, the fastest as far as I'm concerned is the QX9770 on LGA775, but one down is another 'Extreme' model with an unlocked multiplier -- and that's the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor, with an impressive 12MB (2x6MB) L2 cache over four cores operating at 3.0GHz stock. If you're looking for something that spells 1337, pwn, omgwtfbbq, and whatever else you can describe it as, look no further than the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650. Plus you can sit back and relax to see how much it owns in the benchmarks. We won't waste anymore of your time."