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Core 2 Reviews All Around the Web

Posted by Zonk on Mon Jul 17, 2006 06:28 AM
from the concatenation dept.
Intel Hardware
NerdMaster writes "NDA for Intel Core 2 CPUs was lifted on the night from yesterday to today and all major hardware reviewing websites are posting Core 2 Duo E6700 and Core 2 Xtreme X6800 reviews. Here is a collection of several reviews so you can check for yourself whether Core 2 Duo is faster or not than Athlon 64 X2. Reviews posted at Tom's Hardware Guide, AnandTech, HEXUS, Hardware Secrets, OCAU, TweakTown, HotHardware, The Tech Report, Trusted Reviews, Legion Hardware, bit-tech, ExtremeTech, Legit Reviews, Sharky Extreme, HardOCP, PC Perspective, GotFrag Hardware, Gamepyre, X-bit Labs - Part 1, tbreak, neoseeker and Byte Sector." We've already touched on this technology, but there has been (obviously) a lot of discussion about it since it was announced.
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[+] Intel's Core 2 Desktop Processors Tested 335 comments
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."
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  • 6800 (Score:4, Funny)

    by jackb_guppy (204733) on Monday July 17 2006, @08:05AM (#15730391)
    First Intel takes over Apple.

    Now Intel is build extreme 6800 processors.

    The clock rolls back 20 years. I knew the 6800 were better than x86!!!

  • Dear AMD fanboys (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Iamthefallen (523816) * <Gmail name: Iamthefallen> on Monday July 17 2006, @08:06AM (#15730401) Homepage Journal
    Yes, we all know that GPU is a much greater limitation than the CPU. You don't need to point this out, again.

    Yes, we all know that because of this, you don't need a top of the line CPU to play the latest games. You don't need to point this out, again.

    But dammit, how about just being exited over what appears to be a big step forward in CPU performance, price, and power consumption? How about focusing on the technology and the application of it rather than the brand?

    Eventually, AMD will adopt these things as well, and possibly improve on them to try to overtake Intel. Competition and innovation is a Good Thing(tm) for all of us, and not just when it's AMD doing it.

    I'm currently running AMD on all my machines and was looking at upgrading to a X2 CPU later this year. Core 2 Duo has completely changed that. Instead I'm looking at an Intel based system where the money I save on the CPU can be put towards a stronger video card instead.

    • I think AMD will drop the prices of the CPUs to fit into the price curve.. Doing otherwise is commercial suicide, which I don't think they're quite up for yet..
      With you all the way on being excited about having new tech out there, and innovation on all sides is good. Intel may be the big juggernaut, but it's good to see they are still flexible enough to pull good tech out of the hat.
      Personally, I don't really care who has the best and fastest.. I used to want the best rig I could afford.. These days, I w

    • So what will AMD do? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by mgblst (80109) on Monday July 17 2006, @08:24AM (#15730517) Homepage
      for the techreport article:

      In fact, after seeing the Core 2 in action, many folks may be wondering how AMD is going to keep up. The Athlon 64 X2 4200+ currently lists for more than the Core 2 Duo E6600, and that's just not gonna cut it. Fortunately, AMD has confirmed to us that a major price move is coming in July. We don't have the specifics just yet, but they say they intend to maintain a competitive price-performance ratio. That may mean we'll see the dramatic price cuts rumored to be coming, which would be a good start.

      For its next trick, AMD needs to get its 65nm fab process going ASAP. I've heard prognostications that AMD won't be able compete against Core 2 chips with its current AMD64 microarchitecture. That may be the case, but I'm not entirely convinced. The contest we've seen in the preceding pages pitted CPUs manufactured on AMD's 90nm process against CPUs made on Intel's 65nm process. The Netburst fiasco at 90nm has made us forgetful about the benefits of process shrinks, but they can be substantial. AMD could be in a much stronger position if it gets to 65nm quickly.

      Why are there so many fans of AMD? We can all see the core duo is a great chip, but AMD managed a coup, to topple the crown of the reigning champ Intel a few years ago, and that deserved much kudos. I think a lot of us were worried about Intel becoming another Microsoft, and Intel had some very dodgey practises (Rambus, Pentium divide, PIV)
      • The 65nm process from AMD will give us another interesting animal: a 35 W desktop processor. 100% passive cooling without a ridiculously expensive case would be pretty nice, eh?
            • I know we're starting to venture a bit off topic, but I think having finished off PPC with the G5 towers moving to Intel, presumably Conroe, would be a safe bet, though an update to the portables to use the Merom chips if they're available wouldn't be unlikely either. That or the much-rumored true Video iPod. Or both!

    • Re:Dear AMD fanboys (Score:5, Funny)

      by Don_dumb (927108) on Monday July 17 2006, @08:25AM (#15730518)
      It is strange in a way that for years I would only consider AMD, the chips were cheaper more powerful and didn't burn as hot. Intel were the big M$-alike. But lately AMD chips have become more expensive, and now slower.

      Now I will be going Intel if I put anything new in my box. Which I wont because I will probably get a Mac.

      Oh wait, hang on . . .
    • I'm currently running AMD on all my machines and was looking at upgrading to a X2 CPU later this year. Core 2 Duo has completely changed that. Instead I'm looking at an Intel based system where the money I save on the CPU can be put towards a stronger video card instead.

      Isn't this a bit premature? It is confirmed that AMD will drastically reduce prices on their X2 line of CPUs around Conroe's launch. Shouldn't you wait to see what offers the best price/performance ratio? It seems like you have exhibited
      • Not really. AMD will have to do some very extreme price cuts to compete in performance/price. The E6300 keeps up with most AMD x2 CPUS, and I strongly doubt that they will drop the X2 4800 to the $200 range. But even if they do, the lower heat output and power consumption of the E6300 would tip the scale back in its favour.

        Obviously, if they do decide to practically give their CPUs away, I'll consider what is the best option for me at the time. But right now, there doesn't appear to be any chance for AMD to

        • Re:Dear AMD fanboys (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Odin_Tiger (585113) on Monday July 17 2006, @11:19AM (#15731567) Journal
          One tiny problem, but it more than tips the scales IMHO: Boards. Hop over to newegg and look for boards with full support for the C2D's capabilities. Not just "if you plug it in it will boot", but meeting the FSB speed, DDR2, plenty of slots and plugs, etc. The variety is lacking and untried. The E6300 looks -very- appealing right now, but until there is more choice among boards (and until they've had 3 - 6 months to work out BIOS kinks), C2D is not something I'll be giving much consideration.

    • GPU-limited benchmarks (Score:4, Informative)

      by frankie (91710) on Monday July 17 2006, @09:09AM (#15730765) Journal

      The absolute best commentary on this horde of Conroe reviews was from Hannibal:

      As parent post notes, most of the "reviews" focused on high-end 3D gameplay, which is 99% GPU benchmarking and only slightly affected by the CPU. On the bright side, this is an excellent way to make a list of incompetent overhyped bloggers whose articles should be ignored from now on.

      • Dear AMD fanboy,

        Yes, I know that GPU is a much greater limitation than the CPU. You don't need to point this out, again.

        Yes, I know that because of this, you don't need a top of the line CPU to play the latest games. You don't need to point this out, again.

        I'm a working father of two who's just bought a house in need of significant renovations. I'm not a hardcore gamer, I don't overclock my machine and I don't buy a lot of games. If I'm lucky, I can get a couple hours per week in. More likely it's a couple
      • I'm a musician, and I need all the processing power I can get, the more the better. It also needs to be quiet, as in no noise at all. So yes, some people need low heat and fast performance in their desktops.
      • My name is ArcherB and I am an AMD fanboy. This processor, imho, is as much an AMD product as it is and Intel one. Not because AMD developed it, but because it would not exist if it were not for AMD. If AMD were to go under tomorrow, this would be the last processor we can expect to see from Intel for at least 10 years. For this reason alone, I will continue to buy AMD.

        While I applaud you sticking to your guns, I do not understand this stance at all. "Since Linux desktop distros would have never progre
      • If AMD were to go under tomorrow, this would be the last processor we can expect to see from Intel for at least 10 years. For this reason alone, I will continue to buy AMD.

        If you continue buying AMD even if it has low-quality products, it will be AMD who won't research better CPUs. Only iff they start losing market share they'll improve. AMD isn't going out of bussiness, and if it went out of bussiness other company would replace it - it's easy to make money in a market owned by a single company, that's why
  • Both sides are way to good a designing benchmarks and "tests" that show themselves as winners.

    One big attraction (for me) to Intel chips has always been the Intel (north and southbridge) chipsets having seen many systems in various stages of there lives. It is realy hard to beat the stability of an Intel chip on an Intel board and AMD does not offer that (not to say if they did it would be inferior).

    Honestly it is looking more and more like my next system will be an ATI Intel combo like the last one, maybe

  • The giant has awakened ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by vlad_petric (94134) on Monday July 17 2006, @08:16AM (#15730475) Homepage
    Intel has been betting on two "mediocre" horses for too long. The first - Pentium 4 - has been successful initially, with its high clock rates, but in the end people figured out that it doesn't deliever performance (regardless, they kept it at their flagship for ~5years).

    The second - Itanium - as far as I'm concerned, it's simply a step backwards. A processor these days is most of the times limited by the slow memory (it can easily take 200-300 cycles to service a request from memory, as opposed to 2-3 cycles from the L1 cache or 6-20 cycles from the L2). Out-of-order execution (Pentium Pro and after) alleviates the problem to a certain extent, by allowing other instructions that do not depend on the result of the instruction that missed to execute. So the processor can still do something while servicing the miss (quite often it executes other loads that miss, effectively increasing the memory-level parallelism of the processor). Because Itanium executes instructions in order, it simply can't do that. Furthermore the compiler can't tell which instructions are going to miss (it needs a profiler to figure frequently-missing instructions, and only then it can generate prefetches). Intel's solution - let's throw shitloads of caches on the Itanium, to reduce the occurence of the misses. Of course, that makes the chip huge, considerably more expensive, etc.

    Nevertheless, Conroe seems to be an awesome chip. Time to buy some INTC shares ...

    • Re:The giant has awakened ... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by MtViewGuy (197597) on Monday July 17 2006, @11:11AM (#15731506)
      One thing though: isn't the Conroe-core CPU's actually based heavily on the excellent Pentium III-M low-power CPU's with its excellent on-die cache control? It appears that Intel has finally come out with an excellent CPU core that is not only great for the latest games, but also can tackle higher-end multimedia file editing at reasonable speeds (as anyone who tries to do Photoshop image editing or Premiere video files can attest).

  • Do they really need the ad rev from 19 page views? (Score:4, Informative)

    by bobdotorg (598873) on Monday July 17 2006, @08:58AM (#15730692)
    Here's a one-pager link for Anand:
    http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=2795 [anandtech.com]

  • List of 43 official Core 2 Benchmarks (Score:4, Informative)

    by jmke (776334) on Monday July 17 2006, @09:05AM (#15730736) Homepage Journal
    Since the NDA expired I've complied a list of official [madshrimps.be] benchmarks, there are 43 on there already; Top 3 imho are those from Techreport, HardOCP and Anandtech

  • 64bit performance (Score:4, Interesting)

    by billhubbard (989339) on Monday July 17 2006, @09:22AM (#15730833)
    The Core 2 Duo benchmarks are impressive. But where are the tests for 64bit performance?
    Does Core 2 Duo have a problem with 64bit code like the old Pentium 4?
  • I just invested in a lovely upgrade and the parts are due to arrive in the store tomorrow. I'm REALLY glad these Conroe reviews came out when they did because I'm going to change my order!

    I've currently got a socket 754 Athlon 64 3400+ with a GeForce 6600GT. I was planning on upgrading to the AM2 socket with an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ with a GeForce 7900GT. I had heard that Intel had some fancy new chip coming out, but benchmarks showed their current 950 series to be a little slower than the AMD's. I figured this was the best Intel had to throw into the ring so I was confident in my AMD purchase. Now I'm going to hold out a week and buy my first Intel chip in about 5 years.

    I happen to subscribe to the HardOCP philosophy of appreciating the user experience over raw benchmark scores, but it's hard to ignore the sexy selling points of Conroe. The additional speed is great, the difference in L2 cache is enormous (2x512KB on the 4200+, 2x2MB on some of the Intels), the lower power consumption means I can keep my 380W Antec silent PSU (probably), and the cooler temperatures mean less fans and more headroom for overclocking. Plus Intel features the lower price vs. comparable AMD products; the inverse is why I bought my Athlon XP a few years ago.

    Honestly, I thought I had become an AMD fanboy until I saw those benchmarks. I love AMD and their chips have given me nothing but 100% dependable service. However, the same is true of Intel, and I'd kind of forgotten that after so many years. The computing world is privileged to be headed by such fierce and outstanding competitors. I figure I'm still supporting AMD by buying an Intel chip since hopefully it will inspire them to one-up the re-awakening giant once again. I think AMD really needs to shave down to a 65nm process!

  • good with salt (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tomstdenis (446163) <tomstdenisNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Monday July 17 2006, @10:10AM (#15731118) Homepage
    It's best to take this with a grain of salt.

    It depends on what you are doing whether or not Intel is better than AMD [or vice versa].

    Getting 300fps in a game doesn't mean the cpu will be good for software development or as a server [e.g. Tomcat + Apache + ...].

    Also if you're into SMP or just multi-processing AMD is still the way to go. The HT links are such a performance boost over a FSB scheme.

    So really it depends. Hopefully we'll see AMD pulling some rabits out of their hats. In the next year or so.

    Tom

  • C2D Motherboards are way too expensive (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CrimsonSamurai (912915) on Monday July 17 2006, @10:24AM (#15731187)
    The prices for Core 2 Duo compatible motherboards are just plain atrocious. I'm not paying $260 for a high-end Intel based motherboard. It does not have SLI support and thus in my eyes does not justify the hefty price tag. For this reason I may choose to go AM2. I am only a college student and my upgrade money comes from what extra money I have left over from my summer job and my birthday. I'm looking for a cost-effective solution, and although the Core 2 Duo prices themselves look good, the motherboard prices are just plain ugly.

    So chances are I will pick up either a nForce 590 SLI or 570 SLI based motherboard. Currently I am looking at the Abit Fatal1ty AN9 or the MSI K9N SLI. I'm leaning toward the Abit as it is a 590 board but is still reasonably priced at $180 (at eWiz).

    Anyhow, just my 2 cents on the high prices of C2D mobos.

    • I know slashdotters pride themselves on running old machines because they don't need all that fancy stuff but windows 3.1... come on. How can you be productive when you can't load document files that people email you (provided they're running a semi-modern version of office)? With desktops so cheap these days (especially if you're willing to go with a celeron or sempron) there is no excuse for running such old hardware. I mean for real slashdot cred you should be running NetBSD; windows 3.1 just makes you

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