Intel's Core 2 Extreme & Core 2 Duo: The Empire Strikes Back
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 14, 2006 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Application Performance using PC WorldBench 5
Looking at the overall WorldBench 5 performance score, Intel's Core platform has a lead of 15% at the high-end and 10% at the low-end.
The midrange options show similar results. Of course, the overall performance score is something of an abstraction, so it's also important to look at the individual results. (Click on the images below for detailed results; the numbers are completion times in seconds - lower numbers are better).
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Intel leads in almost every instance, with AMD's only win coming in the Ahead Nero Express test. That particular test is mostly I/O limited, however, so the win doesn't particularly count for much. The margins in Adobe Premier, Microsoft Office XP, and 3D Studio Max 5.1 are a bit closer (3%-11%), while the Photoshop, Mozilla, Windows Media Encoder, WinZip, and the multitasking test all favor the Core 2 Duo chips by a slightly larger margin (12%-26%). The net result is clearly a victory for Intel, however.
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invise - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
According to page 3 "The Test", you used an Intel D975xBX motherboard (Intel 975X chipset) for the tests in the article. Yet in the picture of the Tuniq Tower on page 18 "Overclocking", there is clearly an Asus board with a gold/copper chipset heatsink, blue PCI-Express 16x slot, and alternating yellow and black DIMM slots. Which board is this? I suspect a P5WD2 or P5N32-SLI, just from looking at pictures online, but from what I can find neither of those has a gold/copper heatsink on the Northbridge.I'm curious because you got the board's FSB stable at 445 MHz, which is critical when working with a CPU with a low, locked multiplier. If any other users recognize the board please ID it.
spug1 - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
I noticed that too Invise. Can we have some clarification as to whether you used the intel board, or the asus p5w-dh for the testing of conroe?!
cheerz, :)
JarredWalton - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Overclocking was done with the ASUS board. The benchmarks scores were tested on the Intel board as reported on page 3.Suraj - Friday, October 20, 2006 - link
What other parts did u change when overclocking? I'm very eager to know what exact parts u used when overclocking the e6600.Kiste - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Great review, as always. I have to admit though that I was hoping for a bit more with regard to i965 based mainboards.Gary Key - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
We have a few P965 boards in house currently, however all of them are undergoing almost daily bios changes. They should be very solid from a performance viewpoint within 30 days but at this time they are still immature and any performance results shown with them are not final.
Wesley Fink - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
You will see Conroe motherboard reviews the first of the week, and yes, there are 965 boards in the reviews.DrMrLordX - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Could you guys please do a mini-review of this chip? In particular, could you overclock it using a Tuniq Tower 120 or something and give us some idea of how high it will go? I've been wanting to know more about that proc since AM2 launched, but AMD has been doing a lousy job of getting them into retail channels.redpriest_ - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Very detailed, I loved it. But quick question: Your screenshots with cpuid have the stepping as a B1 stepping 5 Conroe - I bought a retail Conroe X6800, and it was a stepping 6 revB2 - and it "only" clocks to 3.466 ghz stably. 3.733 is unstable and 4 ghz is a no boot into Windows; so my question is - is that the stepping you used or was it just a screenshot from an older comparison?Wesley Fink - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Our review samples are all Stepping 5. We also have an earlier Stepping 4 unlocked E6700 that overclocks very well. We understood stepping 5 was the Retail stepping. We will clarify this with Intel later today.