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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IHYLN - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I stopped reading when I saw that the FX-60 rig couldn't even detect the FX-60. Like what a previous poster brought up something is definitely fishy. FEAR at that resolution is GPU limited so I can't understand how the cpu ALONE could make such a huge difference. This simply doesn't make sense. Obviously Anand doesn't know a CPU from a stick in the mud. I wouldn't even have published this nonsense after seeing that.brownba - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
could it be it wasn't recognized since it was overclocked?IHYLN - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
since when do you overclock a CPU and the motherboard doesn't recognize what processor class it is afterwards? Right...brownba - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
all the screenshot says is 'model unknown'...i'm pretty sure that's what my athlon xp says with a small overclock,
since it's not running at an official model clock anymore, it doesn't know what to report.
IHYLN - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I've had 2 s939 boards, a K8N NEO2 Platinum and a DFI UT Lanparty SLI-DR. Both ran my FX-55 which is overclocked to 2.8ghz and both recognize what CPU class it is regardless if it runs at stock or overclocked. I'm not buying that excuse and neither is anyone else.JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
I've got several boards (including the DFI Lanparty RDX200) that report "AMD Athlon Model Unknown" on any overclocked CPU. I mean, go ahead with the conspiracies if you really want to, but what point would it really serve to blatantly lie (either by us, Intel, both, etc.)? If we do it, we lose credibility. If Intel does it, we'll have the truth before launch anyway.Occam's Razor: Intel is damn happy with their performance, and they want to brag about it. I would if I were in their position. We're 4-6 months from launch, so there's not a whole lot AMD or anyone can do to immediately counter.
As I said earlier, who seriously thinks that Intel set out to match or come close to Athlon 64/X2 performance when they started architecting Core? [Intel: "You know, AMD is currently faster than us. Let's throw a lot of money at the problem and see if we can close the gap a bit...."]
clnee55 - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
AMD fan boys would think so.Questar - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
You don't need to buy any excude. You disqaulified yourself from having any meaningful input when you said FEAR is GPU limited at 12x10 on a x1900 crossfire setup.IHYLN - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
my mistake, I missed the crossfire note.photoguy99 - Tuesday, March 7, 2006 - link
These results (if validated) are simply amazing on so many levels - forget the fact that this processor is not released for months - It will take AMD *years* to catch up.- The sheer amount of percentage increase has rarely been this large over the previous records with the introduction of any CPU (new architecture or not). In fact how many times has there been a jump this large in the last 10 years?
- They did it at a lower clock speed. Devastating because AMD just doesn't have the headroom to out scale them on frequency.
- They did it at lower power consumption. Again, very difficult to counter.
- AM2 will probably not even provide a 10% boost. The tabloids are reporting initial samples were actually *slower* than socket 939.
- Even if AMD has a new architecture out in 6 months to a year, it will be hard gain back that much performance per clock.
- This spanking only required a 2.66Mhz CPU! And my god the Conroe EE will run at 3Ghz? Good luck competing with that.
- Price to manufacture has always been in Intel's favor because they are ahead on the process curve. So not only will they lead in performance, they can cut the profit legs totally out from under AMD because Conroe is cheap to manufacture on 65nm, and it will only get worse with 45nm.
Not only am I not an Intel fan boi, I'm writing this on an FX-60 clocked at 3Ghz which I paid a lot of money for thinking it would be one of the fastest systems around for a year. Looks like I won't even be close.