Conroe Performance Preview Follow-Up
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 9, 2006 9:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
The BIOS Issue
The one item that a number of you pointed out was that the BIOS used on the DFI LANPARTY UT RDX200 (RD480) motherboard was in fact the first version released for this particular motherboard. Intel told us that the motherboard was purchased a little over two weeks ago and the BIOS used on it was what came with the motherboard, but we still agreed with you all that the system should be tested with the latest BIOS to remove all doubt of wrong doing.
There are only two BIOS files publicly available for this motherboard, one being the first release that was loaded on the system and the other being a file dated 12/23/2005. The 12/23 BIOS offers the following fixes according to DFI:
1. Fix memory Set 2-1-1-1-1 and 4-1-1 mode wrong.
2. Set Cool'n'Quiet default disable.
3. Change the description of DQDRV.
4. Fix Read Preamble Table Error.
5. Shorten the delay time during clock programming loop.
6. Add over clocks step by step.
7. Fix fill 3114 SVID&SSID under Cross fire mode.
8. Fix soft-reset hang on POST code F2h if enable USB mouse support.
9. Change CMOS used to fix some control item can’t save.
10. Add support K8 FX60 CPU.
11. Update SiI3112 Raid ROM.
12. Fix some SATA(DiamondMax 10 (6B160M0) HDD ) HDD detect fail at first time cool boot.
That’s a pretty long list of changes, which could definitely be responsible for a change in performance. We were able to test the impact of the new BIOS, and our results are below:
DFI LANPARTY UT RDX200 |
10/11/2005 BIOS |
12/23/2005 BIOS |
| Quake 4 - 1280 x 960 (Avg Frame Rate) | 207.5 fps |
207.6 fps |
| F.E.A.R. - 1024 x 768 (Avg Frame Rate) | 151.0 fps |
158.0 fps |
| Windows Media Encoder 9 (Encode Time) | 75 seconds |
75 seconds |
| DivX 6.1 (Encode Time) | 44 seconds |
44 seconds |
| iTunes 6.0.1.3 (Encode Time) | 73 seconds |
72 seconds |
UT2004 and Half Life 2 were absent from our testing, simply because we didn’t have the time to get them installed, but the rest of the scores here should be indicative of the full impact of the BIOS update. In the media encoding tests we saw absolutely no performance impact other than a 1 second reduction in iTunes encoding time. F.E.AR. at 1024 x 768 saw a reasonable gain of 4%. Quake 4 remained virtually unchanged.
With the new BIOS installed we confirmed that Cool’n’Quiet was disabled, so that was not impacting the performance results at all. The new BIOS also correctly identified the Athlon 64 FX-60 processor, although as you can see from the results above, the proper detection of the CPU didn’t translate into greater performance.
The new BIOS in action
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PhoenixOrion - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
I've never bought an intel chip for over the $200 mark. But with this Conroe initial showing of performance I just might save up an additional $50 and spring one for my own personal build.yacoub - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Aside from the fanboyisms from one side or the other, let's just state the obvious:It's great to see Intel being truly competitive once again, taking the performance lead (once these chips come out to market).
In the meantime, AMD better have something on the AM2 platform that will bring them back within 5-10% of the Conroe performance if they hope to compete. It has been ABnormal that AMD has held BOTH the price and performance crowns in recent months considering that generally one item will have better price and the other better performance. After AM2's release it will likely return it to how it was a couple years ago where Intel held the performance crown by 5-10% and AMD had the better price. In that situation we will see a return to Intel by the money-no-object folks and AMD still championed by the poor and destitute (though I would include myself in that category for now). :)
Googer - Friday, March 10, 2006 - link
According to tomshardware.com socket AM2 suffers from a performance loss when compaired to a similarly configured socket 939 system.http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/02/20/toms_hardware_am...">http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/02/20/toms_hardware_am...
bob661 - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Nice job Anand!! I'm still going to wait till the product arrives and is tested but at least you eliminated as many variables as you could with the Intel systems. It would seem that Intel didn't try anything underhanded but like you said, "...grain of salt."porkster - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Some have been saying AMD are considering releasing socket 775 AMD CPU's besides their AM2 socket line, as a means to expand their market. If this is true AMD is targeting the $$$$ again rather than trying to get a whole community by centring on performace.You'd think there would be some form of Intel ownership on the Socket's use, but AMD are releasing also their server socket which is much like Socket T.
Calin - Monday, March 13, 2006 - link
There are lots of possible problems for AMD processors running on the Intel's socket 775:-memory controller would have no way to access memory (outside of using the FSB)
-AMD processors have no FSB, they use AMD HyperTransport (which is a bit slow to allow access to memory)
-the Socket 775 has no support for HyperTransport from chipset to processor
So, AMD would have to compete against Intel without having any of K8 advantages. Not likely.
However, the transition to a "pins on mainboard" socket (unlike the "pins on processrs" in use at the moment) might make sense, especially after Intel proved the idea good.
psychobriggsy - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Ah, driven of Tech Report eh? People have been commenting about the lack of bacon over there recently.AMD will never release a processor on S775.
S1207 uses LGA like S775, but that's it.
Spoelie - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
I just hope this lays to rest the extremely dumb comments I have been reading the past few days regarding this topic.One thing tho I would have preferred to see Intel do, is use the exact same chipset on their mobo, as it is available for Intel systems as well, is it not? Would have taken away any last shred of doubt but I doubt it would have impacted the scores.
Furen - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
Looks like Intel's "20% more performance than AMD" claims are true... right now. I wonder how many speed grades AMD can get out of its 90nm K8 in order to battle Conroe when it actually comes out. I'd guess two more speed grades is the most we'll see this year (so a 3.0GHz X2) which certainly wont make up for the ~20% (overall) performance deficit... so it looks like Intel will be spanking AMD at least until the 65nm shrink and maybe until the K8L comes out.chilled - Thursday, March 9, 2006 - link
That's unlikely given Intel want to be promoting their own chipsets which run XFire fine.