Intro + Testbed
Intel's Conroe or Core 2 Duo as it has been officially named, is creating as much of a buzz amongst the enthusiats as the Athlon64 did. From what we've read about this CPU, not only does it perform exceptionally well, it also manages to reduce the temperatures and power consumption by quite a bit. This is great for Intel as ever since they moved to the Prescott core, things have not went that well for them with AMD constantly challenging and besting them in both performance and power utilization.
All that is supposed to end with Core2. We recieved an Engineering Sample of the E6600 Core2 CPU and as you can see from the CPU-Z screenshot below, this CPU is clocked at 2.4GHz.
This speed is achieved by running at a 9x multiplier at 266MHz FSB. We initally thought that 4MB L2 cache would be shared between the two cores on this CPU but the motherboard BIOS reported 8MB as total L2 cache which means 4MB per core. As per our knowledge, the E6600 will somewhat be placed in the middle with the E6700 (2.67GHz) and X6800 (2.93GHz) above it and the E6400 (2.13GHz) and E6300 (1.83GHz) below it.
The E6600 was tested on an Intel 965 chipset motherboard along with 2 x 512MB Corsair DDR2-800 memory modules, the 7800GTX graphics card and a Maxtor 7200 RPM 80GB Hard Drive. Keeping the system identical, we have the AM2 Socket based Athlon64 5000+ on an ASUS nForce 590 motherboard, as well as the Pentium D 940 and 955 Extreme Edition CPUs on the Gigabyte 975X motherboard. For Socket 939 CPUs, we used 2 x 512MB Corsair DDR-400 modules and the ASUS nForce4 SLI motherboard.
Core 2 Memory Latencies
After publishing this article, we got some inquiries on testing the effects of lower memory latencies and Core 2's performance. This is exactly what we've done on this page using the Corsair DDR2-1066 kit that has 2 x 1GB modules with SPD timings of 5-5-5-15. The following table shows the latencies we've used and the results with specific applications
| | 5-5-5-15 | 4-4-4-12
| 3-3-4-8 |
SuperPI (2M)
| 50 | 49 | 49 |
ScienceMark 2.0
| 5134 | 5217
| 5262 |
| Cinebench | 773 | 773 | 773 |
3DMark 2001SE
| 35797 | 36429
| 36502 |
Counter Strink Source
| 210.6 | 210.2 | 212.0 |
Quake 4
| 163.3 | 163.5
| 163.6 |
The table above shows that higher latencies dont really effect Core 2 that much- a very different picture than the one painted by AM2 CPUs that rely a lot more on better latencies. This is good for consumers as they can pretty much pick any DDR2 module and expect good performance.
PC Mark 2005
 | PC Mark 2005 | |
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| PC Mark 2005: CPU | |
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| PC Mark 2005: Memory | |
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| PC Mark 2005: Graphics | |
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| PC Mark 2005: Hard Disk | |
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3D Marks
| 3D Mark 2001SE | |
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| 3D Mark 2003 | |
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| 3D Mark 2005 | |
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A 15% gain over the Athlon FX-60 and a score of 36000+ in 3D Mark 2001 is mighty impressive- especially considering that we're only testing the 2.4GHz version of the Core 2.
Gaming Performance
| Counterstrike: Source | |
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| Far Cry | |
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| UT 2004 | |
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Once again, we see the Core 2 post mighty impressive gaings of 17% and 18% over the Athlon FX-60 and between 25%-30% over Intel's Pentium D 955 Extreme Edition CPU.
Everyday Apps
| WB: Adobe Photoshop | |
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| WB: Microsoft Office | |
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| WB: Mozilla | |
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| WB: Winzip | |
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Conroe continues to show performance increases in everyday usage applications as well besting the AM2-5000+ by over 20% and the Pentium 955 Extreme Edition by 40% in Adobe Photoshop.
Audio/Video Encoding
| WB: Music Match Jukebox MP3 Encoding | |
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| MT: Audio Compression + Video Encoding | |
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| WB: Microsoft Windows Media Encoder | |
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Core 2 continues its winning streak and while we see a big performance leap in Media Encoder tests, the other two tests dont show as big of a jump.
3D Workstation
| Cinebench | |
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| 3D Studio Max 7: CS Balls 2 | |
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| 3D Studio Max 7: Underwater Animation | |
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Once again Core 2 impresses with an incredible score of 774 in Cinebench- showing that this CPU has very good potential inside Macs as well.
Overclocking/Conclusion
There's absolutely no denying that not only is Intel back in the race, but they will be the performance leader for at least the next few months. This translates really well for the you and I- the consumers as we will no doubt see a price cut from AMD and in the end, will end up with a faster CPU that'll cost less.
According to the motherboard we tested this CPU on, the BIOS was reporting temperatures of under 30 degrees C on idle and a little less than 40 under load- again, mighty impressive. We also tested overclocking, however, for some strange reason, couldnt adjust the vcore. Thus, the following screenshot is the best we could get out of this CPU at stock voltage and using the standard Intel HSF unit.
As you can see from the screenshot above, we managed to increase the FSN from 266MHz to 345MHz for a speed of 3.11GHz- Pretty impressive we'll say. With a score of over 40,000 in 3D Mark 2001, Core 2 is sure to the be enthusiat's choice. We're sure that with a little added voltage, we should be able to reach close to 3.3GHz.
We have the CPU with us for one more day and if there's anything in particular, post now or hold your breath until they're officially released a few weeks later.
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