Spring IDF 2006 Conroe Preview: Intel Regains the Performance Crown
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 7, 2006 3:58 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Intel is very excited about its new Core architecture, especially with Conroe on the desktop. It's not really news to anyone that Intel hasn't had the desktop performance crown for years now; its Pentium 4 and Pentium D processors run hotter and offer competitive or lower performance than their AMD competitors. With Conroe, Intel hopes to change all of that.
From top to bottom - Quad-core 65nm Kentsfield, dual core 65nm Conroe and 65nm Pentium D
Intel setup two identical systems: in one corner, an Athlon 64 FX-60 overclocked to 2.8GHz running on a DFI RD480 motherboard. And in the other corner, a Conroe running at 2.66GHz (1067MHz FSB) on an Intel 975X motherboard.
The AMD system used 1GB of DDR400 running at 2-2-2/1T timings, while the Intel system used 1GB of DDR2-667 running at 4-4-4. Both systems had a pair of Radeon X1900 XTs running in CrossFire and as far as we could tell, the drivers and the rest of the system setup was identical. They had a handful of benchmarks preloaded that we ran ourselves, the results of those benchmarks are on the following pages. Tomorrow we'll be able to go into great depth on the architecture of Conroe, but for now enjoy the benchmarks.
As far as we could tell, there was nothing fishy going on with the benchmarks or the install. Both systems were clean and used the latest versions of all of the drivers (the ATI graphics driver was modified to recognize the Conroe CPU but that driver was loaded on both AMD and Intel systems).
Intel told us to expect an average performance advantage of around 20% across all benchmarks, some will obviously be higher and some will be lower. Honestly it doesn't make sense for Intel to rig anything here since we'll be able to test it ourselves in a handful of months. We won't say it's impossible as anything can happen, but we couldn't find anything suspicious about the setups.
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ninjit - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Explain how 1280x1024 is GPU limited on an ATI X1900 Cross-fire system (i.e. 2 cards)???Idiota!
radzio - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Media encoding tests (e.g. DivX) were not GPU-limited. Result ?Conroe 2.66MHZ is 30% faster than overclocked Athlon Fx60 (2.8MHz).....
JustAnAverageGuy - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
532 Average FPS in F.E.A.R.?I'd sell my opteron right now if that were the case.
/typo notifier
Justin Case - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Unless your monitor happens to support a refresh rate of 532 Hz, it would be kind of useless. Not to mention that your eyes can't really tell the difference for anything above 120 fps or so (that's one of the reasons why no monitor bothers with refresh rates higher than that).sp1nfer - Wednesday, March 8, 2006 - link
Please cut the 'our eyes can't see more than <insert pointless number here>' bs. You have no concrete fact to prove it. Let me give you some: some games play smooth at 30fps but as they drop below 25, gameplay gets hindered.And please provide a link to the Hz:FPS ratio/link.
Having 500fps in a game with a processor and 300 with another clearly shows there is more room ahead for the 500fps processor even if you can't enjoy all of them.
Fenixgoon - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
See wht happens when Intel actually has to produce a good CPU?I'm no Intel fanboy, I go for what fits my budget. Of course, I can afford neither an A64 or a Conroe, but hopefully this will drive other CPU prices down on both sides.
flyck - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
p4 was also a good cpu. only not the best.looking @ those benchmarks i would have to say i'm pretty amazed by it. AMd might get 10% closer with AM2.... but i think they'll have a problem with there K8 like it is now. Well i think we are back in the days of northwood(800) vs XP. maybe a bit worse for amd, but we have to wait for 6 months to say that.
SLIM - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
WOW, Awesome performance. Can't wait to see the real reviews against the then current competition.PS: Please fix the average framerate graph for FEAR, last I checked average framerate was not usually 3x the maximum (or reverse the titles of the graphs or something).
goz314 - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I'm sure the AMD cult and Intel naysayers will try to find something wrong with this initial impression of Conroe's performance, but for the time being it's nice to see the 800 pound gorilla "wake up" again.BrownTown - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I'm an Intel fan and I see stuff wrong with these benchmarks. Its just a litle bit of a stretch to see that much improvement on benchmarks set up by Intel and not suspect something fishy is going on.