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Ars Evaluates Core 2 Duo in Latest System Guide
RevDobbs writes "I always take a peek at the Ars Technica System Guides before white-boxing my next PC. Well, today I hit the site and see that they recently published their first post-Core 2 Duo System Guide." From the article: "The new Intel Core 2 Duo processors bring a swift change to the Hot Rod, making the lifespan of Socket AM2 very brief in the Hot Rod. Performance from the Core 2 Duo (aka, Conroe) appears to be excellent in all regards, from pure performance to heat output. Overclocking prospects also look excellent, with an overclocked Core 2 Duo being an amazingly fast chip for the money."
There isn't a decent board for the Conroe that's under $250.
Either they don't support DDR2800 (anything less is a waste), or they don't have SLI, or they're missing amenities like firewire or decent onboard sound.
A "budget" Conroe system is difficult to spec since unless you go DDR2800 you aren't going to have much over a DDR400/DDR500-based AMD K8 system (and I'm not talking AM2, but the same logic applies). Memory bandwidth is a bottleneck for performance and usability. Despite Conroe's advances in CPU power, most situations where you wait for the computer are not CPU bound (unless you are heavy into movie/music decoding/compression). An bus-overclocked low power K8 (like the Opteron Denmark) can still beat a Conroe system in memory throughput.
DDR2800 brings this to parity but then you are not talking about a cheap system anymore; it's everything EXCEPT for the CPU that costs too much.
Hopefully in the next few months we'll see price drops in DDR2 memory and more competetion in the Core-2 Duo compatible motherboards. This should make them more affordable and help to shake out the gold implementations.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Intel is already on 65nm. The last I read about AMD's move to 65nm on the tech sites was that it was next year, by the time Intel will already be moving to 45nm. AMD is officially a generation behind in that department.
"Sufferin' succotash."
Intel is the first but not always the best. Their move to 90nm for instance led to Prescott processors hotter than the sun. Granted their move to 65nm was a lot smoother, being first isn't always the goal.
Frankly, even given where I work I'm happy that Intel is turning out good [or at least better] hardware. We all win when technology is getting neatoer.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
65nm tech has nothing to do with the speed -- its the differences in core microarchitecture.
(Example Yonah vs Merom laptop cpu's, both 65nm -- Yonah being the older micro architecture essentially two dothan (Pentium M) cores on a single die, where meron being the laptop version of conroe -- and merom is faster than yonah clock for clock.)
I remember not that long ago when socket 939 came out that AMD said that this was going to be the socket they were going to stay on for a looong time and that the sacrifices of obsoleting the 754 and 940 were totally worth it: when AM2 came out so soon after it really made me wonder, why is there a need for a new socket right now? It's not like X2AM2 chips are that much different from X2939 ones...
I sorta remember that too, so I went and looked. Socket 939 came out in June 2004 (or thereabouts). This could be part of the downside of having a built-in memory controller. Since DDR reached the end of it's reach (PC3200 seeming to be the fastest commonly available) and DDR2 commonly available, they decided to go with a new pin-out so that you couldn't mistakenly mix/match the wrong CPU with the wrong memory. Less confusion for the customer.
At least, I think that's why the pin-out was changed... (according to the AMD FAQ it was).
What AMD has said at this time is that the new AM3 chips (which support DDR3) will be compatible with AM2 and AM3 motherboards. So you can put an AM3 chip into an older AM2 motherboard, but not the other way 'round. We'll see if that holds true...
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
If you're an overclocker, the Asus P5B's new BIOS revision supports multiplier unlocking for non Extreme Core 2 processors, as http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2822 points out.
NTFS wasn't a journaling filesystem until v5, released with Windows 2000. Ext3 is not the only other journaled file out there. SGI's XFS, IBM's JFS, Sun's UFS logging, Veritas's VxFS, NetApp's WAFL, BSD's soft updates, and ReiserFS all predate journaled NTFS, some of them by quite a few years.