Spring IDF 2006 Conroe Preview: Intel Regains the Performance Crown
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 7, 2006 3:58 PM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Gaming Performance
The one area where AMD has been the clear leader for years has been in gaming performance - Conroe changes everything.
Updated: In Don MacDonald's keynote he also provided us with another reference point for Conroe's performance, this time under Call of Duty 2. We have no idea what settings they ran at but the results we saw were Conroe at 111 fps and a Pentium Extreme Edition 3.73GHz scoring 90 fps. But the most interesting gaming tests are below:
First off we've got Quake 4 running the 1.0.5.0 patch at 1280 x 1024 with High Quality settings. The only demo available was Intel's own demo but nothing looked out of the ordinary with the recording. We tested with both r_useSMP enabled and disabled, first the SMP disabled numbers. Updated: The Quake 4 scores have been updated as mentioned in our follow-up article.
With SMP disabled, Conroe holds a 25% performance advantage over the 2.8GHz Athlon 64 X2. Enabling SMP provides a similar 24% performance advantage.
Next up is a Half Life 2 Lost Coast demo, once more an Intel supplied demo but there's only so much you can do to a demo recording to make it favor one CPU maker over another:
Conroe's performance advantage extends to 31% under Half Life 2, talk about a complete role reversal here.
We finish off this page with Unreal Tournament 2004 and a 20% performance advantage for Conroe.
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SilverBack - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
You can't necessarily judge times for encoding as the files encoded were probably different.EnergyWatcher - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
> You can't necessarily judge times for encoding as the files encoded were probably different. <Anand should have noted it if the files were different and the results, therefore, were not comparable. I didn't see anything like that in this review.
-e
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
The files were different, whenever benchmarks were identical to what we've run for our CPU reviews in the past I tried to mention as such. Otherwise you can't assume that the numbers are comparable to previous reviews using our own hardware.Take care,
Anand
SilverBack - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
As far as I can tell his post above has merit.The BIOS Version 6.00 PG0 pre dates 2004....
What exactly is going on here?
Tuor - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I don't see how you could say that Intel has regained the speed crown when the product hasn't even shipped yet. Sure, you can say it is *poised* to regain the speed title, but doesn't the headline jump the gun a bit? I think so.BTW, call me a AMD fanboi if you want, but there are reasons, despite pure speed or even bang-for-the-buck, that make me not want to buy Intel's chips: I *despise* their business practices. If the were to change their ways, as OCZ appears to have done, then I will reconsider, but not until then.
overclockingoodness - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
It hasn't been proven that Intel uses strong-arm tactics by the court of law. Until I get a statement from the court convicting Intel, I won't care what AMD has to say. Intel and AMD are both in it to make money, there's no way AMD is the innocent underdog they claim themselves to be.Sunrise089 - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
Just because a company that is "in it to make money" does not make them unable to be declared "innocent". Instead, AMD tries to make money in order to better their shareholders, and all the while gives us wonderful parts in our PCs, helps the economy, creates jobs, and assists in international trade. It isn't either company's pursuit of capitalism and therefore profits that makes one good or evil, it's Intel's corruption of capitalism by denying fair competition that creates the problem.gimpsoft - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
are those CPUs full DRM ?Bladen - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
The K8 has the advantages of the integrated memory controller and hyper transport. are these features not more advanced than what is in Conroe?It's not like AMD are still using punchcards...
Al though this prefomance advantage is as big as I had hoped, and bigger than I expected.
EnergyWatcher - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
From the article:------
Both systems had a pair of Radeon X1900 XTs running in CrossFire and as far as we could tell, the drivers and the rest of the system setup was identical. They had a handful of benchmarks preloaded that we ran ourselves, the results of those benchmarks are on the following pages.
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Why does the AMD system's BIOS screen say "AMD Processor Model Unknown" and "(C) 1984-2003"? And what about "AwardBIOS v6.00PG"? Are they really running the AMD system with a BIOS that's so old that it predates the entire FX-series, and (IIRC) the entire Athlon 64 (K8) series?
And why does this page documenting ***AMD K7*** motherboards list an "Abit KX7-333" (among others) using "Award BIOS v6.00PG"? http://www.digital-daily.com/motherboard/kt333-rou...">http://www.digital-daily.com/motherboard/kt333-rou...
And what does this "misconfiguration" mean for how the BIOS and OS configured the processor and system? Could that explain Intel's "superior" performance?
-e