Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 Preview from Taiwan
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Gary Key on June 6, 2006 7:35 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words: Conroe Availability and Pricing
While Intel's Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors will be released at the beginning of Q3 of this year it will take some time for all of Intel's shipments to be Conroe based. The scary statistic is that by the end of this year, only 25% of Intel's Performance Mainstream desktop processor shipments will be based on Conroe. The remaining 75% will still be NetBurst based, meaning they will be Pentium 4, Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition.
Given how competitive Core 2 Extreme is with the Athlon 64 FX-62, you would expect no one to want to purchase a NetBurst based processor if they can get a Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Extreme for a competitive price. Intel does have a plan to deal with the over availability of undesirable Pentium Ds and limited supply of Conroes; Intel would do what anyone would do if you're trying to move a lot of undesirable product: cut the price.
By the time Conroe ships, Intel's Conroe and Pentium D pricing will be as follows:
| CPU | Price |
| Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (2.93GHz/4M) | $999 |
| Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965 (3.73GHz/2Mx2) | $999 |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.67GHz/4M) | $530 |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.40GHz/4M) | $316 |
| Intel Pentium D 960 (3.60GHz/2Mx2) | $316 |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 (2.13GHz/2M) | $224 |
| Intel Pentium D 950 (3.40GHz/2Mx2) | $224 |
| Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.86GHz/2M) | $183 |
| Intel Pentium D 940 (3.20GHz/2Mx2) | $183 |
| Intel Pentium D 930 (3.00GHz/2Mx2) | $178 |
| Intel Pentium D 920 (2.80GHz/2Mx2) | $178 |
| Intel Pentium D 820 (2.80GHz/1Mx2) | $133 |
| Intel Pentium D 805 (2.66GHz/1Mx2) | $93 |
While the Pentium D has never been as attractive as AMD's Athlon 64 X2, at these prices some of them may be difficult to resist. The $93 Pentium D 805 will be particularly hard to ignore, when was the last time you could build a solid two processor workstation for a few hundred dollars?
The Pentium D 805 aside, the rest of the Pentium D line becomes extremely attractive after these price cuts take place, especially when you consider that AMD's cheapest dual core offering is still hovering around the $300 mark.
Intel's price cuts are very aggressive, to the point that they are the talk of the town in Taiwan. Every single motherboard manufacturer we met with asked us about Intel's price cuts and, more importantly, how AMD would respond. We've been told that AMD will respond with a series of price cuts of its own, the questions when and how much remain unanswered. Next week, in Taipei, AMD will be speaking with many motherboard manufacturers about its response to Intel's threat.
Despite the lower pricing on the Pentium Ds, it's not like Conroe ends up being all that expensive. The entry level E6300 and E6400 chips are both priced at $183 and $224, respectively, which is far from high. As attractive as the Pentium D's pricing may be, Conroe's performance and lower power consumption may still end up driving more demand than there is supply.
For the Dells of the world, Conroe availability shouldn't be too much of an issue because companies like Dell get first dibs. For years of not going with AMD, all while demanding something more competitive from Intel, you better believe that Dell is going to soak up every last Conroe that it can.
The problem then becomes what happens after Dell and HP have eaten their lunch, unfortunately the concern is that aggressive pricing won't be enough to reduce retail demand for Conroe. What we're worried about happening is a very small supply of Conroes on the retail market in late Q3/early Q4, resulting in much higher street prices than what you see in the table above. In the worst case scenario for Intel, Conroe's limited retail availability could result in a price to performance ratio equal to or worse than AMD's Athlon 64 X2.
The benchmarks we've seen show Conroe as a very strong competitor to the Athlon 64 X2, availability could be what limits how much lost ground Intel can regain before AMD has a chance to respond with K8L.
While performance here is extremely strong, we also haven't even touched on the overclockability of Conroe; from what we've seen, hitting above 3.5GHz on the highest end parts isn't too far fetched on air cooling alone. The absolute highest we've seen on air is 3.8GHz from a Core 2 Extreme X6800 processor. By the time Conroe officially launches, we'll be able to provide a full set of performance tests but so far we're seeing even more data to support the idea that Intel really has a winner on its hands.
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bob661 - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link
To be honest, I thought it would be a bit more than shown here but it's still pretty good. If I was an OCer I'd jump on this. Since I'm not, I won't be buying one for myself. My wife will get one since I'm sure some of my customers will be interested in this platform and I want to be familiar with it.thestain - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link
You need higher resolutions and everything turned on to highest imnage quality settings to test this and.. the fsb limit will be more than likely exposed by this sort of test. Test it! Yes, Battlefield 2, etc.. could bring the system to a crawl, so.. ?? does this mean it is not important?I have a Dell 2405.. set to 1920X1200... I don't change this for games.. and most still play... some crawl.. a little, but.. I am a prospective buyer for the top cpus from Intel and AMD.. and.. while Conroe looks awfully impressive, it worries me that real world enthusiast class gaming test are not being done.
No excuses.. they need to be done!!
Try 1920X1200 resolution.. if you need to put the cards in SLI on both boards.. and this is important.. since Intel chipsets limit SLI.. but it still needs to be tested.
Turn on everything to the highest setting.. everything.. and lets see how Intel's cpu handles this kind of stress on system memory.
and.. if Anandtech and Intel are afraid to do this.. it is very telling indeed.
Mike
JarredWalton - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link
First, limited testing time and hardware limits what benches can be run. Second, SLI doesn't work on anything but NVIDIA chipsets, which don't exist for Core 2 Duo yet, so single GPU results are the only option for apples-to-apples. (CrossFire should work on 975X Core 2 Duo, but wasn't available at the time.) Third, I have a 2405FPW as well, and I can run everything from 2.0 GHz X2 3800+ to 2.6 GHz FX-60 with a single 7900 GTX GPU and get essentially the same performance at 1920x1200.If you're only going to play games at WUXGA, massively upgrading processor performance won't help. End of story - at least until GPUs that are twice as fast become available. This is not an excuse; it is reality. Benchmarking CPUs under GPU-constrained situations doesn't make sense. You can see the results of CPU scaling with a single 7800 GTX in http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?...">this X2 overclocking article; 7900 GTX would scale better, but eventually you still run into GPU limitations.
None of the above changes the fact that Core 2 Extreme is substantially faster than FX-62 in current applications. SLI/CF support in the future should actually benefit more, as there's CPU overhead associated with such configurations. Video encoding will also benefit greatly from Conroe's improved architecture.
In regards to your above comment about 2004 benchmarks, 2005/2006 versions of SysMark and Winstones do not exist, which is why we continue to use older versions. We would love to run PCMark06 and a bunch of other benchmarks (we had some of them available), but time constraints did not allow for comprehensive testing. Rest assured that we have seen nothing from Conroe that indicates serious problems in any applications; at worst it is slightly outpacing FX-62 performance, and at best it can be 50% faster. In general, a 20-25% performance advantage over FX-62 is common.
DigitalFreak - Wednesday, June 7, 2006 - link
Yeah, what he said. :-)neweggster - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link
No offense Mike but did you say enthusiast? DELL is no where part of that word. LOL DELL, just the sound of them makes me gasp. In all good fun and humor, no offense. =)Calin - Wednesday, June 7, 2006 - link
That Dell is the monitor. I think even real enthusiasts have nothing against Dell monitorspeternelson - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link
In the table of processors, 805 and 820 are shown as "2Mx2". This is incorrect.
Both of these processors only have "1Mx2". Please amend.
Also weren't there some other new low end procs like 925 on the Intel roadmap, due to launch around the same time as Conroe? These may be more attractive than 805 or 820, neither of which can do virtualisation.
eRacer - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link
The Pentium D 945 (3.4GHz, 2x2MB, no VT) should be on that list as well. It is on the July 23rd price list for only $163.http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/attachments_dir/ext_jpg/p...">Intel price list
thestain - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link
2004 benchmarks.. Don't you have 2006"Poeple who pay the top price to buy these cpus will not be playing games or running applications at 1024 x768,
At least test these two systems at 1600X1200 or higher.
Do you have any multi-threaded test? Something newer?
Anantech is testing the Core 2 Duo at where it will perform best and this is somewhat suspicious. Does anyone who spends the kind of money people will dish out for the x6800 really use an old, rusty monitor with 1024 X768 resolution?
Conroe might kick butt, but at least give a platform where it goes beyond being tested for single core performance at high resolution, ok??
Some of us would like to see how it can perform when breaking a sweat in a multi-tasking environment..
and.. those early memory bandwidth results.. sure are not consistent with the rest of the results are they, any ideas as to why?
rqle - Tuesday, June 6, 2006 - link
i can benchmark a 1ghz cpu with SLI/Crossfire at 2500x2500 and compare it to an AMD64/conroe and claim the AMD64/Conroe is only 3FPS faster OMG WTH.isolating variable, isnt that what you learn in 4th grade science project.