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Intel's Core 2 Desktop Processors Tested
Steve Kerrison writes "It's early morning here in the UK, but that doesn't stop us from being around to see the launch of Conroe and friends, Intel's newest desktop chips. Even a $180 Intel CPU can beat an Athlon FX-62 in a number of tests. Now that's bound to get the fanboy blood pumping, right? We've also taken a look at a pre-built system that's powered by the Extreme X6800 CPU, along with an nForce 4 SLI chipset. As you'd expect, it's quick."
Gotta wonder if intel can legitimately deliver at this price or if they are going with loss leader tactics to try and regain marketshare.
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
There's a much more detailed review up at HotHardware.com
will this be enough to run Vista?
We have a comprehensive review on OCAU also: http://www.overclockers.com.au/article.php?id=4895 87
We compare the new high-end 2.93GHz X6800 and the 2.67GHz E6700, with the current Pentium D 955XE and AMD's A64 FX-62. Lots of info, loads of benchmarks and of course, some overclocking.
One of the things with HardOCPs review shows one extremely interesting thing...
If you have a single high end card (7900), there isnt a whole lot of difference between the FX62 and the X6800, or even the E6700. Most games are GPU limited now, and will be until the next generation of cards is released in 3+ months (FEAR is really the only exception to this).
They didnt run any benchmarks at 800x600 or whatever, because those results are more or less useless. Who spends $500+ on a processor and $500 on a video card and plays games at that low resolution.
What matters if you're going to buy a new rig now is the price performance ratio. If you're a midrange gamer, your best bet is probably a E6600 and a $250 video card. Or an AM2 setup, it all depends on the prices AMD cuts their X2 line to. We'll find out closer to the end of this month what the deal is. Come August 1st we'll have a very good idea of which platform is on top.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1989036 ,00.asp
Uh-oh, rant ahead, I tried to avoid it, I swear... ;)
I am a raving AMD fanboy, but I'm a raving AMD fanboy because they've made the best CPUs for a long time. They also have a wonderful motherboard architecture that makes very high bandwidth applications much easier to deal with. I find myself wishing I could plug the Core2Duos into an AMD motherboard... on-chip motherboard controllers would help Intel also. Ah, what do I care, I want to see a real motherboard built around a Cell, the overall system bandwidth is almost as exciting as the cpu. Too bad that means buying everything from Rambus... :(
Responding to anonymous... I must be mad.
But your point is accurate. Gaming is mostly GPU limited; my gaming system, an s939 amd64x2 3800+ with a pair of old GPU's (7800GTX 256MB) achieves equal or better gaming results than all of these.
I suppose the point is are such prices for CPUs currently justified when they wont have much impact on user experience?
No doubt the new entry level core 2 duo's seem to be the upgrade of choice to maintain near cutting edge; but a high end GPU seems to be a wiser spend than a new CPU for gamers.
As for video encoding et al, HardOCP had the same results in their "real world" testing as others, but at least they make an effort to simulate the way the "average" person might use the things; either way, I'll reserve judgement here until I see some 64bit results, since encoding in native 64bit will be the telling tale IMHO.
In any case, I think we are reaching the point of dimishing returns, a year old 2GHz processer already rips music as fast as the drive can deliver it, already transcodes video as fast as the drives can burn it etc... GPUs control gaming... It is nice to see intel returning to the game in a serious fashion and no doubt this will have positive results for the consumer if AMD try to match price performance. I was mainly trying to point out that the "benchmarks" aren't nescessarily useful in describing the performance of these beasts in operation.
err!
jak
..but it seems I need to upgrade to this new Intel processor so that my computer can handle all the ads in the website.
What?
-William Brendel
What the benchmarks mean is that if you do a lot of media encoding, compiling, etc, you would probably benefit from conroe. HOWEVER, if you play games, regardless of whether or not you are on an AMD/INTEL system currently--if your system is pretty new--Do not upgrade at this time, as you are GPU limited, not CPU limited. Basically conroe: Large performance gains in cpu bound applications Little performance gain in gpu bound applications, obviously. This is good for intel. My systems for the past 7 years or so have been AMD. My next one very well may not be. The good news for everyone is that AMD is now the underdog again. Remember what happened last time they were the underdog? We got the athlon. The cpu speed wars went into a frenzy. For the last several years (5 or so) Intel has been sucking balls. Their chips have not been performance competitive. Clock speeds in both camps have stagnated. AMD chip prices have went way up compared to how they used to be. This is good news, AMD will go into overdrive developing their next-gen chips. Amd chips will become dirt cheap again. We'll see a new performance war. This is something i've been waiting for anxiously for a few years. I am very excited. Another thing is that the new intel chips take much less power than the old ones . (thank god)
replacing it with NEW Folger's Crystals! (lets see if they notice the difference)
(cribbed from my post in anothe rplace).HardOCP are complete AMD whores here.
They do the power tests with power saving settings turned off. This gives AMD the edge at idle, mostly due to a lower transistor count. As other sites have shown, turning the power saving settings on (as one would expect) puts Intel far out front at idle.
How do they end that article?
" I would highly suggest keeping your eyes on AMD low wattage / energy efficient processors for those projects that require a noiseless solution."
So they make Intel look worse than they are, and yet Intel still wins at under load. What's the takeaway? Buy AMD.
In the gaming, after the Intel gets done smoking the FX-62, what do they say?
"It is very interesting that in all of our testing, both "what is playable" testing and "apples-to-apples" testing, the Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 and Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 are very close in performance. In fact, in some games they are dead even. The price difference between the two is very extreme with the Core 2 Extreme X6800 costing $999 and the Core 2 Duo E6700 at $530. Does it look like the price is justified between the two for gaming? We can safely say "no" as far as gaming goes with this gameplay testing we have performed."
Then, when speaking of AMD, do they mention even the E6700 ($530) beat the FX-62 and the FX-62 costs over $800? Nope.
"As for the AMD Athlon 64 FX-62, all of our testing shows that it does trail the two new Intel CPUs in gameplay performance. So, if you wanted to point one out as being a "winner" then for sure it is the new Intel Core 2 X6800 and E6700. But, if you look at the amount of difference between the AMD and Intel CPUs, you will see that it isn't enough to amount to anything. The only game that we saw any real-world difference in was Oblivion, and even that was tiny. A little overclocking would clear that difference up."
Any mention of overclocking levels and how the Core 2 Duo overclocks well? Much better than an FX-62 usually. Nope.
What's their takeaway from the gaming section where a $530 Intel beats out AMD's fastest chip (at $800)?
"We have proven here that the flurry of canned benchmarks based on timedemos showing huge gains with Core 2 processors are virtually worthless in rating the true gaming performance of these processors today. The fact of the matter is that real-world gaming performance today greatly lies at the feet of your video card. Almost none of today's games are performance limited by your CPU. Maybe that will change, but given the trends, it is not likely."
and then
"Lastly, I would advise everyone that is thinking of rushing out and purchasing their latest upgrade that we are sure to see HUGE pricing slashes out of AMD before the end of the month."
Way to go HardOCP. Rig your tests, ignore Intel victories and make your summary "buy AMD".
You have zero cerdibility, HardOCP.
Also, you used bullshot wrong. Bullshot is a term for fake screenshots designed for games (like EA uses). It doesn't fit here.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Everything else aside, that was the one thing that interested me the most about the review - the fact that the new conroes are allegedly going to be consuming about half as much power as current desktop chips. Why is this important? Well, if such gains can be made on the desktop, I'm _really_ looking forward to the laptop chips. Maybe the 7hrs claimed battery life by laptop manufacturers will actually be accurate in the near future.
Most likley they are just having good yeilds. They've pretty much got the kinks worked out of their 65nm process with the Pentium Ds they made on it so it wouldn't supprise me that Core 2s are having high yeilds. High yeilds = low cost per unit. This is espically true if the yeilds are high, but mostly at lower speeds. Say 90% of chips work, but of that 90% 50% only work at the slowest speed. Well, just knock the price down on that and get it back in volume, hike it up more on the rarer fast chips.
If you look at their current pricing, it's not real supprising. You find you can get a Pentium D 65nm for as little as $175. That gets you a 3GHz one on their old 90nm technology. The price creaps up on the first incriment, a 3.2 is $217. However it takes a sizable jump then to $317 for 3.4GHz. The 3.6GHZ, if you can find it, is $500 or so. Past that, well there's only the "extreme" edition and that's over $1000 for 3.73GHz.
The jumps like that are normal. They can easily produce low speed chips and there's a large market for them so they are cheap. Maybe a couple incremental upgrades. Then you hit a knee and prices start jumping fast.
Based on their current pricing for their current high end, I don't see anything out of the oridinary for this new pricing.
The processor is generally the thing I upgrade the least because it simply has the least increase in demands. Video cards you can upgrade once a year and not be doing it too often given the advances they have. Throwing lots of RAM at your system is also a good idea. Processor? Well for gaming and most apps it just really isn't that big a deal. Get a good dual core of prett much any design you like and call it good. Hell if all you are worried about id gaming and not doing things in the background while you game get a good single core, games still don't make any use of a second core to speak of.
I moved from a P4 2.4GHz to a Pentium D 2.8GHz when I did a system overhaul not too long ago. Why such a minor processor upgrade, you might wonder? Well because the processor wasn't the issue. That 2.4 was plenty fast, for games at least. The graphics card was the issue and I wanted PCIe which my board didn't support. Had the board had the same socket, I would have just kept the processor. It was fine (though because of teh audio work I do I'm appreciating the dual core). I just got a dual core because they weren't that much more expensive and it has geek appeal to me.
The real useful thing, in my book, is that the Core 2s run cooler. Current processors have tended towards too hot. AMD is much better than Intel but even they put out quite a bit of heat at the high end. It sounds like the Core 2s are quite efficient for the performance they give. That's good because I value a quiet system and frankly, it's as good as I'm willing to make it at this point cooling wise. I'm not going water cooling and there's just no more air cooling I can do short of making the fans speed up.
I don't think I'd recommend these as an upgrade to anyone who already has a dual core AMD or Intel system. Unless you are doing simulations or rendering or something I just can't see the minor increase as worth it. Certianly not for games. However if you need to upgrade anyhow, these look like winners.
The headline states that "Even a $180 Intel CPU can beat an Athlon FX-62 in a number of tests" but if you read the article, the $182 Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.83 GHz) chip wasn't tested. All of the performance data relates to the $224 Core 2 Duo E6400 and pricier chips. The results are impressive, but I think the "$180 chip beats Athlon FX-62" deception should be pointed out to anyone who didn't pick that detail up from RTFA.
TDP of Core 2 Duo E6400: 65W
TDP of Athlon FX-64: 125W
Whoops!
Probably a year or two before Vista ships.
List kep up to date of Core 2 Reviews so far including 16 articles, with more to follow.
thats it...you're fucking banned from using parenthesis :P
now goto your room
Unbelievable.
Here's the answer the GP was probably looking for (from Anandtech's conclusion):
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
The basic fact is that "hardware enthusiasts" are neither good writers nor are they all that technically knowledgeable. Their saving grace is that they are willing to spend days on the drudgery of benchmarking. We are willing to forgive their artistic pretensions in exchange for a valuable service. You just have to read the reviews with your BS filter on.
It is true that this is not the first time that Intel has focused on IPC, that integrated memory controllers are not evil, and that few people fully understand the detailed workings of SSE (definitely not me). These are all instances of marketing BS. But they don't really mean anything. The benchmarks show that the Core architecture has much better IPC than the P4, regardless of whether this is due to the extra pipeline, shorter pipelines, better cache, lower memory latency, etc. And the benchmarks also show that the Core has better memory latency than P4 despite the external memory controller. And lastly Intel has drastically improved the floating point performance of the Core processor over its predecessor, the Pentium M, thanks to improvements in the SSE unit, whatever those improvements may be.
This is always going to happen when a journalistic organ is supported by sponsors from the industry it covers. The editors are obligated to include a bunch of marketing BS. You can get valuable information from these compromised sources, but you have to read between the lines.