CPU/Mobo Core 2 Duo Reviews are out !!

[mjp1618]

Uh well i know that but thats not my point.I am not trying to defend AMD or anything.my point is achieving 35W on 90nm is not a joke and that too DUal Core....thats it.

OK, I agree totally on that count. 35W on 90nm is really superb. But my point was, Turion X2s are on 90nm too, and still consume less power...

It will be interesting how much increase in clocks AMD can get with their 65nm process...

 

[mjp1618]

Yup they are strange... You should try reading the last Fragbox review they did... You will die laughing hyeah:...

They were so pissed by ATI that even though a of fault in the nVIDIA based BFG card they did not recommaned the system putting the blame on ATI chipset initially... Later upon inspection when the problem was discovered they still did not consider revising thier rating on the system... They did however updated the ariticle but rating for the system remained the same... Do read when you have time

Thanks, I will, but with the huge number of Core 2 reviews, I doubt I will get the time any time soon...

 

[mjp1618]

PC Perspective: Intel Core 2 Duo X6800 and E6700 Review - Conroe is Here

Power Consumption

Idle power was taken at the Windows desktop while load results were taken from a dual-threaded CineBench run.

Utterly ridiculous. That's about all I could say when looking at this graph for the first time. What a change an architecture makes! The Core 2 Duo E6700 system, under a full CPU load, pulls 164 watts; the same power an idle system pulls when running the Pentium XE 965 or AMD FX-62 processor. When looking at what the two flagships from Intel and AMD are pulling, the once dominant AMD processors now look like the power hogs. With the X6800 system pulling 182 watts versus the FX-62 system pulling 256 watts (that's a 40% difference) the Core 2 Duo is going to run cooler and quieter than the Athlon FX.

Conclusions

With Core 2 Duo officialy upon us, I can't help but be impressed. Though I have seen and played with all the newest hardware over the past 6 years, this new processor architecture is in many ways the most dramatic shift. AMD was on the top of the hill, completely dominating the enthusiast market in terms of raw performance and power consumption for nearly 4 years. In one swoop, Intel has taken over that hill top with a single processor launch.

Performance

Performance on the X6800 and E6700 Core 2 Duo products was stellar. In nearly every single benchmark we saw here in our review at PC Perspective, both the X6800 and the E6700 came out ahead of the Athlon FX-62 processor. While the $999 X6800 CPU beating the $1000 FX-62 CPU isn't a big story on its own, the $530 E6700 processor beating it is. The X2 4800+ CPU obviously couldn't keep up with the E6700 either, and that is the most price competitive part AMD has for it. AMD is going to be in more than a bit of trouble come the end of July if they don't have an answer to Intel's Core 2 Duo product line. The E6700 sample we tested with here was able to trounce the FX-62 in many cases, and came out the leader in nearly every test we threw at it.

Final Thoughts

Conroe is here and it's exactly as Intel promised; great performance, low power consumption and wide range of prices for different performance levels. There is a new king on the enthusiast block and AMD won't have an answer until at least the end of the year. Core 2 Duo is the success that Intel needed to work their way back into enthusiast's hearts and wallets.

What's more, the Core 2 Duo wins the PC Perspective Editor's Choice Award.:clap:

 

[mjp1618]

The Core 2: Intel Goes for the Jugular - TheChannelInsider

Final Thoughts: The Core of a New Machine After a long gestation period, Intel has successfully delivered on its promise of substantially faster CPUs that use significantly less power. For the near term, Core 2 looks like the must-have CPU for enthusiast and mainstream user alike. So far, AMD's only short term response seems to be its odd "4x4" technology, a hybrid dual-socket technology aimed at really hard core users. But even those hard core users may simply opt for Core 2 Extreme. After all, it seems to be easily overclockable beyond 3 GHz, and runs like a bat out of hell—and uses less power and generates less heat than a potential dual-socket FX-based system. Next year, we'll see the K8L line emerge from AMD. But for the interim, it's going to be a long, hot summer and a cold winter for AMD. About the only thing AMD can do is play the pricing game, which can only cut into profitability.That's not to say that everything will be clear sailing for Intel. The company still has substantial inventory of Netburst class processors that it will need to work through. Demand is likely to be quite high for Core 2, and the issue of product allocation may rear its ugly head. To its credit, Intel has been busy building Core 2 CPUs, but high demand may still put a stress on production and distribution. Intel claims that boxed, retail processors should be on store shelves less than a month after the launch, while systems from most manufacturers will be available on day one.That's a problem that Intel is probably happy to have at this point. Core 2 looks like a winner, and will likely be the shiny new bauble that performance enthusiasts love to have dangled in front of them. We're certainly impressed with what we've seen: high performance and low power utilization. And while Core 2 Extreme is pricey, the E6700 has shown its no slouch.So get out your credit cards. You want one. You know you do.

 

[mjp1618]

NeoSeeker: Core 2 Duo Launch & E6700 Review

The Conroe and the FX-62 were roughly even in:
PC Magazine Business Winstone
PC Magazine Content Creation Winstone

The FX-62 dominated the E6700 in memory benchmarks:
Sandra Memory Bandwidth - especially at stock speeds, it was closer when overclocked
RightMark Read - the FX-62 winning by 6% stock, 23% OC
RightMark Write - not even close, the FX-62 winning by 17% stock, 65% OC
RightMark Latency - on-board memory controllers win big time - factor of 2.6 OC'd, and "only" factor of 2.4 stock

The E6700 dominated the FX-62 in:
Sandra CPU Benchmark - but the results are questionable
RightMark Bandwidth - E6700 beat the FX-62 by 14% stock, 53% OC
LAME MP3 Encoding - E6700 beat the FX-62 by 26% stock, 34% OC
TMPGEnc MPEG2 Encoding - E6700 beat the FX-62 by 23% stock and OC
WinRAR file compression - E6700 beat the FX-62 by 16% stock, 28% OC
CineBench Rendering - E6700 beat the FX-62 by 30% stock, 23% OC
POVRay Rendering - E6700 beat the FX-62 by 21% stock, 36% OC
Call of Duty - E6700 beat the FX-62 by 30% stock, 53% OC
Comanche 4 - E6700 beat the FX-62 by 13% stock, 28% OC
Doom 3 - E6700 beat the FX-62 by 21% stock, 39% OC
HALO - E6700 beat the FX-62 by 21% stock, 30% OC
Jedi Knight - E6700 beat the FX62 by 16% stock, 34% OC
Unreal Tournament 2004 - the E6700 beat the FX62 by 12% stock, 28% OC

What the above means is that, the FX-62 can equal or best the E6700 only in a few synthetic benchmarks. In all real world benchmarks, it's a no contest.

The Conroe's new architecture certainly did what it was supposed to - deliver excellent performance, at reasonable power consumption levels. In a nutshell, the Core 2 Duo E6700 performs on par, or outperforms every other contender we tested in every test except for the memory benchmarks. It does this with the same, or lower power consumption than every other contender. The E6700 isn't even the top end E6800 Extreme part, and it's taking on and beating the FX-62 in all gaming and multimedia tests by at least a 13% margin and often as high as 20-30%. And to top it all off, we found the FX-62 for sale at the same nationwide webstore for ~$1150USD, nearly twice the cost of the E6700!

Editor's Choice here too!:hap2:

 

[Checksum]

just read the anandtech review. and OMG!! the E6600 goes upto 4 ghz on air! :O and not to mention it kicks the FX-62 @$$ in all the tests even at default speeds!! ive become an intel fan in 10 mins flat! seems like intel has won this round fair and square!

The E6600 seems to be the best upgrade by the end of this year! im not even waiting for AM2 anymore

 

[kev182]

Sticky this please

And even though we knew the performance of Conroes for quite some time, this is still amazing.....

Core2Duo manages to blow AMD right out of the water!!

This perhaps sum it up well enough

Lmao, since when do we game at low res, no AA and low settings....im guessing that test was done 800x600!

conroe will beat an A64 at that res just like a 7900GTX will salughter a x1900xtx at low res/low detail...but check out the [H]OCF review and firing squad done at 1600x1200 and 1280x1024..

most all cases max dif is 1-2FPS and average is almost exactly the same... not saying that the conroe isnt an awsome chip.... but it just doesnt really "blow AMD out of the water" in terms of gaming

encoding is a dif story

 

[Blade_Runner]

^^true that, low res benchies mean zilch ! That said conroe is no doubt an awesome chip

 

[Darklord]

I second that,no doubt Conroe is awesome but when it comes to gaming,it is no way humiliating the A64 at all.

 

[SpitefulPentium]

I second that,no doubt Conroe is awesome but when it comes to gaming,it is no way humiliating the A64 at all.

and that's all I care about.
If conroe doesn't show much of a lead in terms of gaming performance, I, for sure, am not upgrading. I'll stick to my "T1000"

 

[Nikhil]

and that's all I care about.
If conroe doesn't show much of a lead in terms of gaming performance, I, for sure, am not upgrading. I'll stick to my "T1000"

It doesnt show much of a lead compared to an FX -62.... compared to our 3200s, it is light years ahead I guess....

 

[Darklord]

Well but then Nikhil you are forgetting the fact that they are either using 7950 GX2 or X1900XTX or SLI or CF setups.When multi GPU setups come into the picture,CPU power does become a bottleneck.So please keep in mind that the GPU also matters,the CPU isnt doing the rendering is it ?

 

[Nikhil]

True.......

But then I guess even with our 6800 GTs, a Conroe would be quite a bit faster than our present configs.

And since we play most games at 1024 x 768, the difference would be massive.

 

[Darklord]

I dont think so Nikhil....

The difference would be noticeable with SLI and CFX.

 

[mjp1618]

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 & Core 2 Duo E6700 Processor Review - Sharky Extreme

The benchmark results for the new Core 2 Extreme X6800 and Core 2 Duo E6700 processors are simply astounding, and it's been a long time since we've witnessed such performance dominance in the desktop market. The Core 2 processors also handled every benchmark we tossed at them, running media encoding tests with the same ease as pure CPU tests like CINEBENCH 9.5. Overall Core 2 desktop performance is exceptional, and the new Intel line ranks at the very top of every benchmark ranking, other than memory bandwidth.

The gaming performance of the Core 2 Extreme and Duo processors is, if you can believe it, even more impressive, and Intel definitely takes the crown in this area. Some of the performance margins were jaw-droppingly large, and the Intel Core 2 Extreme and Duo models were faster than AMD across the board. It didn't matter if we were testing an old school game like Quake 3 or a high-end one like F.E.A.R., the Core 2 Extreme and Duo processors cut through them like a hot knife through butter. This level of flexibility is exceptional for a new processor with a current feature set, and gamers with a library of both old and new games need not worry.

The Core 2 Duo E6700 system once again posts the lowest power consumption - less than the Athlon 64 X2 3800+, while offering performance exceeding that of an Athlon 64 FX-62. The Core 2 Extreme X6800 actually improves its relative position compared to the Idle results, and moves up two slots to slide between the Athlon 64 X2 4400+ and 4800+. Once again, the Pentium D power consumption is off the scale, and the Core 2 Duo E6700 almost cuts those results in half.

Intel will sell the 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo E6700 at $530, while the 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo E6600 is set at only $316. Both of these offer exceptional value for the price, especially as these can both outperform the Athlon 64 FX-62 and the top-rated Pentium EE models. It really is amazing that a $300+ processor is faster than anything you can buy today, but that's exactly what Intel has done.

Conclusion

The launch of the Core 2 processor line has hit the market with a bang, and offers up an incredible combination of performance and value, coupled with low heat and power specifications. These processors are so good, that it's difficult to highlight any real negatives. The Core 2 Extreme and Duo processors offer record-breaking performance, industry leading power specs, and are priced so that virtually anyone can afford one. It has been a long time since we have seen a processor walk over the competition like this, and we should all thank AMD for bringing out the very best from Intel, as well as proving that competition does indeed work.

 

[mjp1618]

Core 2 Duo E6700 and Core 2 Extreme X6800 Review - Hardware Secrets

This is the worst review for the Core 2s I have seen yet.

The Core 2 Extreme wins almost all benchmarks, but the E6700 underperforms for some reason when compared to other benchmarks...

Conclusions

Accordingly to our tests the answer to the big question, “who was the best dual-core CPU, Intel or AMD?” is “It depends on the kind of application you are running”.

Amazingly enough comparing apples to apples it seems that AMD has better CPUs for multimedia, 3D applications and 3D games, while the new Core family achieved a better performance in office-style applications.

Quake 4 was the only game tested, by the way.

But on other kind of applications, Intel made AMD to eat dust. On office-style applications – programs like WinZip, antivirus, Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat and web browsing – the new Intel CPUs based on the new Core microarchitecture achieved, on average, at least double the performance compared to competing dual-core CPUs from AMD. We could clearly see this on Sysmark 2004, which runs real-world programs. PCMark05, in a lesser scale, confirmed this tendency.

Core-based CPUs were also faster on Quake 4, probably because of the greater amount of L2 memory cache available. We can only confirm if the advantage of Intel Core 2 CPUs on office-style applications and Quake 4 is exclusively due to the higher amount of L2 memory cache or not when Intel releases versions of Core 2 using smaller caches.

A very different review indeed...

 

[mjp1618]

Intel Core 2 Duo 'Conroe' E6400, E6600, E6700, X6800 - TrustedReviews

A better comparison for desktop parts, would be against its previous NetBurst processors. This is where the biggest difference is noticeable as they are the slowest of every processor on test. Even the budget E6400 beat the previous ~£700 955 Extreme Edition in everything but Call of Duty 2. If you want more detail than this, go and see the results for yourself – but everything simply wipes the floor with Netburst.

The next question, is how does Conroe compare to the Athlon 64 architecture? For this, I used the overclocked Athlon FX-62 at 2.92GHz to match (almost) the frequency of the X6800. In fact, the FX-62 gets an unfair advantage as being overclocked it has slightly faster memory frequency. It is doubly unfair, as an Athlon rated above 2.8GHz is not yet available.

Luckily for AMD, the difference wasn't quite as big as the hype led us to believe. On average the X6800 is 18 per cent faster. Don't get me wrong – this is still a fair chunk. An area where Intel had a clear lead was with Audio encoding where the X6800 was as much as 40 per cent speedier. Video encoding was also 25 per cent faster on the Conroe based chip – that's 239 seconds difference. Considering that was only on a 15 minute clip, there are some significant savings in time to be made with larger files. Thinking even further a field, if you are in the business of render-farms, this could really make a difference to productivity.

Verdict

As with everything, it's not just about the technology, it's the final product. The Athlon 64 architecture might not be as far behind as we thought – clock for clock. However, pushing an Athlon 64 beyond 3GHz is currently a difficult task and even with a future die shrink to 65nm I don't see it scaling as well as Core 2 Duo. If you take a close look at our benchmark results, you'll see that the 2.66GHz E6600 is faster than an FX-62 in almost all cases and costs around a third of the price. Things don't look good for AMD at all if its flagship product can't stand up to a mid-range part.

Intel has already demonstrated quad-core technology, and has the ability to push clock speeds to 3.46GHz and above - even with the current steppings as I discovered myself. So the future is looking very strong for Intel.

Conroe/Core 2 Duo is the single most significant launch in the desktop area in years. It is a truly excellent product offering great value for money, cool running and low noise. Judging by the pre-purchase pricing on Overclockers, the E6600 is looking to be the choice chip right now and should be high on your wish list.

 

[kev182]

True.......

But then I guess even with our 6800 GTs, a Conroe would be quite a bit faster than our present configs.

And since we play most games at 1024 x 768, the difference would be massive.

lmao i would think it would be 1280x1024 by now

 

[Nikhil]

lmao i would think it would be 1280x1024 by now

I was actually referring to spiteful pentium and me....coz we have more or less identical rigs....

Of course I could be wrong....he may game at 1280

 

[mjp1618]

PlanetAMD 64: Conroe is here - Core 2 Extreme, and Core 2 Duo evaluated by Planetx64

Yes you heard right Planetx64.com (that's the same people that run PlanetAMD64.com) has had the chance to test Intel's new flagship the Core 2 line.
They compare the Core 2 Duo E6700 and the Core 2 Extreme X6800 against the AM2 X2 5000+ and FX-62.

The actual review is here, on the parent site PlanetX64.

The evaluation as it stands is still enough to show that Intel has finally pulled their collective heads out of the sand and gotten back into the performance game… and with a vengeance. They were not satisfied with meeting the AM2’s performance, they surpassed it significantly. Even with the latencies inherent in having the memory controller in the northbridge, Intel’s new architecture is able to pretty much pound AMD into submission. There will still be some areas that AMD will out perform Conroe. But they will be few and far between for now.

In all, as of this writing Intel’s new Core 2 CPUs are the predator in the CPU jungle. Running down and devouring the current competition.