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
Gaming Performance
The one area where AMD has been the clear leader for years has been in gaming performance - Conroe changes everything.
Updated: In Don MacDonald's keynote he also provided us with another reference point for Conroe's performance, this time under Call of Duty 2. We have no idea what settings they ran at but the results we saw were Conroe at 111 fps and a Pentium Extreme Edition 3.73GHz scoring 90 fps. But the most interesting gaming tests are below:
First off we've got Quake 4 running the 1.0.5.0 patch at 1280 x 1024 with High Quality settings. The only demo available was Intel's own demo but nothing looked out of the ordinary with the recording. We tested with both r_useSMP enabled and disabled, first the SMP disabled numbers. Updated: The Quake 4 scores have been updated as mentioned in our follow-up article.
With SMP disabled, Conroe holds a 25% performance advantage over the 2.8GHz Athlon 64 X2. Enabling SMP provides a similar 24% performance advantage.
Next up is a Half Life 2 Lost Coast demo, once more an Intel supplied demo but there's only so much you can do to a demo recording to make it favor one CPU maker over another:
Conroe's performance advantage extends to 31% under Half Life 2, talk about a complete role reversal here.
We finish off this page with Unreal Tournament 2004 and a 20% performance advantage for Conroe.
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Briggsy - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I'd say the evidence is enough to support 'Wait For Release and Reviews' rather than 'Bah, sod Intel' which has been the path for upgrading the past couple of years because Intel's been lost in the wilderness. However right now Conroe looks like a beast!AMD might gain at high clock speeds with DDR2-800, for applications where memory bandwidth is beneficial, especially if multithreaded.
When Anandtech reviews dual-core, it'd be interesting if they did scaling tests to see if DDR2 helps the X2 at high speeds compared with DDR1.
Questar - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
As I said to you alter ego Griswold in another thread.Go ahead and tell me AMD is launching another architecture this year. Say K9 is shipping.
Please make yourself appear as foolish as Grissy.
Griswold - Wednesday, March 8, 2006 - link
You sure sound like you get a free conroe soon. Doesnt take idiots like you to convince me that Intel could very well be the better choice very soon. It's previews like this that does the trick not your fanboi comments that we had to read even before anyone had any clues as to what Intel may come up with.Doormat - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
K8L could ship this year. It wouldnt surprise me to see AMD push the K8L out to all segments intead of just the server segment if they are in fact that far behind Intel's Conroe on the desktop.Falloutboy - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
looks like intel put a bit more into conroe than just making a faster Pentuim M, hopefully AMD has something up there sleeves to combat this. Had a feeling intel wouldn't sit back another generation. but one thing to keep in mind is the 2.8ghz part was only running with ddr400 I'm woundering what the performance picture would look like with that A64 running the ram at ddr600 type speeds.vijay333 - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
dammit, there goes my well-laid plans for upgrading my system. come on amd, don't make us pay for over-priced intel chips again :)code65536 - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Don't forget, the Pentium D is currently cheaper than the X2, so AMD is not necessarily cheaper.Questar - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Now that's impressive.Griswald won't have much to to say in this thread.
Griswold - Wednesday, March 8, 2006 - link
Oh yes I do, I'll still give you a warm fuck you, because you're a fanboy and meanwhile I have no problem to admit that I will buy an intel based machine when my next upgrade is due in 2007 - if AMD doesnt have anything better.Questar - Wednesday, March 8, 2006 - link
Impressive use of language there. You're really showing off your level of education.