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
Gaming Performance using Quake 4, Battlefield 2 & Half Life 2 Episode 1
Our gaming performance analysis starts out with Quake 4 running at 1600 x 1200 with High Quality visual settings. We used version 1.2 of Quake 4 and SMP was enabled:
The performance advantage in Quake 4 starts off high, but not astronomical for the Core 2 processors. The Core 2 Extreme X6800 is just over 11% faster than the Athlon 64 FX-62, mainly because we're looking at it in a more GPU bound light than we have in the past. Regardless, it is a performance advantage and far better than the older days of NetBurst chips where Intel's best could barely keep up with AMD.
Looking at Battlefield 2 performance, Intel begins to improve its gaming performance lead as we are becoming more CPU bound:
The Core 2 Extreme X6800 now attains a 19% performance lead over the FX-62, and the E6600 manages a 10.9% advantage itself.
Next up we've got the recently released Half Life 2: Episode 1, running at default quality settings (auto detected with a pair of X1900 XTs installed) with the exception of AA and aniso being disabled. As with all of our gaming tests in this article we tested at 1600 x 1200:
Half Life 2: Episode 1 provided us with numbers closer to what we saw with Quake 4, the performance advantage here is just over 12% for the X6800 over the FX-62. With a couple of speed bumps, AMD could equal Intel's gaming performance here. But the real issue for AMD is the fact that the E6600 priced at $316, is able to outperform the FX-62 at over twice the price. The E6300 continues to provide a great value but isn't nearly as impressive as the rest of the Core 2 line.
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defter - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Xbitlabs has a great E6300 review:http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2...">http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2...
Overclocking was limited by a motherboard, but they still managed to achieve 2.94GHz with 420MHz FSB, not bad from a <$200 chip. E6300@2.94GHz was way faster than Athlon64X2@3GHz.
Frackal - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
4ghz Conroe, holy shiatAndrewChang - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Loved the title, and loved the article. Can't wait till the Return of the Jedi...JackPack - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Jedi is considered to be weakest film of the three....formulav8 - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Yeah, but the Emperor WAS overthrown. :)Anyways, good job on the review. Intel is definitely trying to almost GIVE those PD cpu's away it seems. $93? Not that I don't blame them. They would almost HAVE to give them away to get rid of them.
Jason
haugland - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Page 18:According to the prices on page 2, the price for the 2.4GHz E6600 is $316, while the 2.13Ghz E6400 costs $224.
mobutu - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
I quote:"The 2.4GHz E6600, which outperformed the FX-62 in most benchmarks at stock speed costs $223, and overclocked to 4Ghz with excellent air cooling"
It costs $316 according to Intel charts. Please fix it.
10x
JarredWalton - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Fixed (also for post below).mi1stormilst - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
I was like skimming throught the article and thinking to myself wow. Then I went back and looked at the benchmarks and realized that until I see benchmarks with a wider range of video card and cpus I will reserve my excitement. At the moment my $120.00 used 3200 venice running at 2600MHZ with an X1800XL gives me some very good performance.JarredWalton - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
I http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=279...">looked at performance with several CPUs using a 7600 GT (slower than X1800XL, but not by a huge amount). Basically, on lower end GPUs you will be GPU limited and just about any fast CPU. Maybe not always with NetBurst, but K8 and Core2 will be more than sufficient for all but multi-GPU setups (until next gen GPUs arrive).