Conroe Performance Preview Follow-Up
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 9, 2006 9:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Final Words
The performance picture with regards to Conroe hasn’t really changed all that much - on average we’re still seeing a bit over a 20% increase in performance over an overclocked Athlon 64 FX-60. While it’s worth noting that these results should be taken with a grain of salt, we really were not able to determine any cause for suspicion based on Intel’s setups. The machines were as clean as they could get, with the BIOS oversight having no tangible impact on most performance.
Believe it or not, Intel doesn't seem malicious in their intent. The AMD system could be better configured by using a RD580 based motherboard instead of a RD480 platform, but other than that there's not much else that can be done to improve the performance of the system Intel used. Obviously we're not going to rely on these initial benchmarks for our final take on Conroe, but the scores are extremely interesting to say the least.
Conroe is supposed to launch in Q3 of this year, and here we are at the end of Q1 with some fairly impressive performance numbers. What could happen over the next quarter or so?
AMD will be launching Socket-AM2 in Q2 of this year, which will bring about more memory bandwidth as well as lower power consumption thanks to the Energy Efficient CPUs that will ship on the platform. We have yet to see whether or not real world performance will go up as a result of the move to DDR2, but it very well may.
On the Intel front, there is a lot of time for performance optimization with regards to Conroe and its platforms. It’s also worth noting that the 2.66GHz E6700 we previewed here is simply a high end mainstream part, it is not an Extreme Edition flavor of Conroe. At 2.8 or 3.0GHz, a Conroe EE would offer even stronger performance than what we’ve seen here.
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Zebo - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
No! read about Osborne effect. Essentially this is why new product demos like this, months ahead of schedule, are so rare and NDAs for all products exist.archcommus - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Well good for Intel for coming out with such a strong product, but I'll always have to go with the best bang for the buck, wonder if that'll still end up being AMD even if their parts are weaker across the board this time around.Just hope AMD stays in the game, we can't afford to have the little guy fall behind too much.
samuraiBX - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
I've been a diehard amd fan, but kudos to Intel for ramping up competitive products. I have only a couple of additions I'd like to see with the testing:1. I noticed that anandtech used the 2-2-2-5 T1 timings for the RD480 chipset. I remembered from an anandtech review that the best timings for this chipset is 2-2-2-7; not sure how much of a performance difference that would make, but I'd like to see the difference, however slight.
2. I know that this website's impression of the RD480 chipset wasn't stellar, and while I can understand if Intel couldn't purchase the RD580 chipset two weeks ago, I'd imagine it would have been possible to obtain this week, or at least borrow an RD580 board from ASUS; isn't ASUS a participant at IDF this year?
2. I understand that there was limited time, but I would also like to see how the conroe chip would do with 3d studio max. I'm looking to build a high end 3d animation workstation, and I'm looking at the performance leader, whether AMD or Intel.
Wesley Fink - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
We did find 2-2-2-7 to provide the best bandwidth in our memory testing on the RD480 chipset, but the difference between 2-2-2-5 and 2-2-2-7 would be less than 1%, and certainly not significant.samuraiBX - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
As an addendum:I went to Bit-tech.net; the performance difference by Conroe is awesome! However, it was curious that on their F.E.A.R. benchmarks, the Intel overclocked FX-60 did worse than the reference FX-60.
Accord99 - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Different platform (NF4), different video card (single OC 7800GT). The bit-tech system may have been mored tweaked and perhaps there's some additional overhead in multi-GPU setups like Crossfire which causes reduced performance at extremely low resolutions.HurleyBird - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Did anyone else notice that on the Intel Quake 4 timedemo performance *increased* for both processors but with Anand's timedemo performance *decreased*I wonder why that is?
IntelUser2000 - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
You mean on the SMP enabled and disabled benchmarks?? That's because on the page, while SMP disabled(SMP=0) is first on IDF Quake 4, SMP enabled(SMP=1) is next one while on Anand's Quake 4, SMP enabled is first, while SMP disabled is second(skeptics...).
THANKS FOR CONFUSING PEOPLE ANAND, otherwise great article.
MrKaz - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Why Ati drivers where modified to recognize the Conroe processor?What was the problem if the processor didn’t get recognized?
I mean if the FX60 could say Unknown Processor and have no problems, (my mobile 2600+ says the same and runs OK).
What problem would have come from the drivers by not recognizing the processor?
Some drivers optimizations there? Like NVIDIA/ATI?
amano - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Just wondering.. did they use fear.exe, or a renamed fear.exe?Because there seem to be some issues with the fear benchmarking that cripple the AMD:
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=254...">http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?t=254...