Intel Core Duo: AOpen i975Xa-YDG to the Rescue
by Gary Key on May 4, 2006 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Motherboards
Synthetic Graphics Performance
The 3DMark series of benchmarks developed and provided by Futuremark are among the most widely used tools for benchmark reporting and comparisons. Although the benchmarks are very useful for providing apple to apple comparisons across a broad array of GPU and CPU configurations they are not a substitute for actual application and gaming benchmarks. In this sense we consider the 3DMark benchmarks to be purely synthetic in nature but still valuable for providing consistent measurements of performance.
In our first tests, the combination of the Intel Core Duo and AOpen i975Xa-YDG makes for an impressive showing against the AMD Opteron 165/175 and Asus A8R32-MVP setup at both stock and overclocked settings. The Intel platform had no issues running the full 3DMark series when overclocked but our AMD platform struggled at first until we dialed in the right mix of voltages and memory settings.
General System Performance
The PCMark05 benchmark developed and provided by Futuremark was designed for determining overall system performance for the typical home computing user. This tool provides both system and component level benchmarking results utilizing subsets of real world applications or programs. This benchmark is useful for providing comparative results across a broad array of Graphics subsystems, CPU, Hard Disk, and Memory configurations along with multithreading results. In this sense we consider the PCMark benchmark to be both synthetic and real world in nature while providing consistency in our benchmark results.
The margins are closer in the PCMark05 results but the Intel platform continues to show an advantage over the AMD platform at stock and overclocked settings. It is obvious from our test results that we can expect even greater results from the Conroe and Merom processor series.
Rendering Performance
We have added the Cinebench 9.5 and POV-RAY 3.6 benchmarks as they heavily stress the CPU subsystem while performing graphics modeling and rendering. We utilize the standard benchmark demos in each program along with the default settings. Cinebench 9.5 features two different benchmarks with one test utilizing a single core and the second test showcasing the power of multiple cores in rendering the benchmark image. We had planned on generating 3dsmax 7 benchmarks but our AMD platform would not complete the underwater benchmark. We are still investigating this issue.
The Intel Core Duo desktop platform showed its strength in the extremely demanding POV-RAY benchmark, bettering the AMD platform by 18%. In our limited testing with the Asus N4L-VM featuring the 945GM mobile chipset our stock Intel Core Duo numbers were slightly better than the AMD platform in the Cinebench 9.5 benchmark and only about 6% greater in the POV-RAY benchmark indicating AOpen's choice of the i975x chipset certainly makes a difference in the performance ability of the Core Duo.
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Gary Key - Friday, May 5, 2006 - link
Sorry, being a selfish s.o.b. with this drive, actually I am testing two of them for an upcoming article. :)
sabrewulf - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
I haven't been following the development of Conroe too closely, but isn't this chip essentially performing like Conroe will? Or am I missing something?Some of the tests were impressive, but the gaming tests were certainly not "20-40%" improvement over AMD like everyone is wishing.
MrKaz - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
And "will" never be.Don’t forget Intel was using:
- Some special ATI driver.
- Crossfire setup (maybe modified),
20%~40% that you will never get, unless you have such kind of configuration.
On non SLI/Crossfire configuration will never be higher than 5%, 10% improvement...
And thanks that a lot to the 4MB cache, and minor processor (P3 redesign) changes.
Don’t forget that the Intel dual core with 4MB shared cache can act as one BIG single core processor with 4MB cache and the second core with 0MB of cache for the extra “stupid” calc...
IntelUser2000 - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
LOL. I always doubt that people can be such a dumb fanboy even I see them over and over again in time.
How do you explain Xtremsystems benchmark, and all the architectural advantages?? Did Netburst's poor showing really blind you??
MrKaz - Friday, May 5, 2006 - link
Fun boy me?It's you who calls him self by the stupid nick name Inteluser2000.
Some time there are complete morons here and you are one of them.
ME the "fan boy" has to "defend" Intel, a thing that you with your little brain can’t do.
Read my reply to your fan boy friends, there you will find why conroe will be good, and it's not because it's Intel.... dumb moron....
redbone75 - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
I don't think it was a "special" driver per se, if I recall the driver had some changes made in order to recognize Conroe.
I just love how a lot of people refer to Conroe as a P3 redesign as if it's something so bad. No, it's not a P3 redesign, there are elements of what made the P3 so successful incorporated into the chip, but that's not what makes the chip so awesome. Also, so what if it is ultimately just a "P3 redesign" as you put it? You use what works, and obviously this works. Hey, the K7 core was pretty good, and K8 is so well designed that AMD can ride it for a few more years.
MrKaz - Friday, May 5, 2006 - link
"in order to recognize Conroe"Why they need to recognize Conroe?
-Would work?
-Did work but with inferior performance?
-Special optimizations?
-New instruction set (SSE4) support for improved performance?
Questar - Thursday, May 4, 2006 - link
Wow, some fanboys are still in denial.This is an interim MOBILE chip that just put the smack down on an Opteron. What's going to happen when the real thing comes out?
MrKaz - Friday, May 5, 2006 - link
When the real thing come out? That’s easy:Core duo plus:
- 2MB cache (+5%~10%)
- 2X FSB (+4%~8%)
- 800Mhz DDR2 (3%~6%)
- x64 support (0%)
- Higher clock speed 2.1Ghz to 3.3Ghz (anyone can say 50% performance increase?)
I’m not a fan boy, it’s you Intel stupid morons that can even read and make some thought why should Conroe be faster than AMD Athlon 64….
Go back and reread the article about:
Intel Core versus AMD's K8 architecture
Don’t expect conroe be very different from core duo... I’m not saying that’s bad…
Questar - Friday, May 5, 2006 - link
You forgot a couple of things:Addidtional ALU Unit
Twice the SSE performace
Better code reordering
Larger reservation station
New micro-ops