General Performance

Although our usual general performance suites aren't available under Vista, something we often use in our motherboard reviews is: PCMark '05.  PCMark is a somewhat unusual benchmark as it is a synthetic performance test that tries really hard to be applicable to the real world. 

The tests used by PCMark '05 and the applications they are based off of are listed in the table below:

We focused on two of the PCMark tests: the system test suite and the CPU test suite.  The system test suite is composed of the following tests:

And the CPU test suite consists of the following tests:

We reported the overall PCMark and CPU test scores.

PCMark '05  

The overall PCMark '05 score indicates a clear victory for Intel, with both the E6700 and E6600 outperforming the Athlon 64 X2 6000+. The advantage is about 10%, but if we look at the CPU score things change a bit:

PCMark '05  

The E6700 is still on top, but the X2 6000+ manages to outperform the E6600. It's not a huge change and the tests are mostly grounded in real world applications, so the question is - will the trend hold up as we test individual applications?

The Test - Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit Media Encoding Performance
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  • Roy2001 - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    Trouble with 965P? That's rare case. 1st time to me actually. My DS3+E6600 system has yet to give me trouble. My old Athlon systems, both desktop and laptop, do not work very well with USB/PCI wifi card. Laptop need to boot/wake without wifi card inserted and desktop will lost connection once every day.

    I am not an fanboy, I am just stating the fact. As you can see, I have more AMD systems than Intel system.
  • johnsonx - Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - link

    Your wifi card problems were far more likely due to the drivers, and possibly the cards themselves, than due to the AMD platform. I've seen both of those problems on all manner of systems, both AMD and Intel. Besides, it just isn't the type of problem I would hang on the platform.
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    P965 at launch was really quite flaky. Many people (me among them) had memory compatibility problems, and not just with elite memory. The BIOS updates have now pretty much fixed any problems, but some of those updates took 2-3 months after launch to fix all of the important stuff (depending on motherboard). And let's not even get into the "DirectX 9" G965 fiasco... I think we're still waiting on drivers that are even remotely able to run DX9 content, and it's still slow at that.
  • Thatguy97 - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link

    man i bought myself a couple x2s after the price cuts back then still used a core 2 duo e6600 as a primary but they were so cheap i couldnt help myself had to get a 5600+

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