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| Media Encoding- DivX and Itunes | ||||||||
Fresh from the show floor of Intel's March 2006 Developer's Conference, and after spending some time behind closed doors with Intel, we have a sneak peek at Conroe performance for you today. The following is a run down of benchmark numbers we recorded with hands-on testing of an early 2.66GHz Conroe-based dual-core system, versus an overclocked AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 dual-core system at 2.8GHz. Before we jump into the numbers, we'll give you glimpse of what the chip itself actually looks like with a couple of spy photos we obtained at the conference as well. Next we should give you some insight into the limitations we had to work with in our test methodologies and whether or not we felt the playing field was level. We were given access to two systems, one with Intel's on i975X based "BadAxe" motherboard, a Gig of PC-5400 RAM and a pair of Radeon X1900 XTX cards configured in CrossFire mode. The other system was an Athlon 64 FX-60 based system with an ATI RD480 based motherboard from DFI. Apparently Intel was unable to get access to a CrossFire Xpress 3200 board for this test setup but by in large, we are confident our test benchmark analysis would offer little advantage by testing on this more recent update of ATI's chispet. Beyond that, each system is decked out equally enough, (DDR2-667 CAS4 for the Intel system and DDR400 CAS2 for the AMD system for example), that things definitely looked to be on the up-and-up. The only variability that may come into play would be our gaming benchmarks and the differences between the motherboards tested in CrossFire mode. Again however, we're fairly comfortable noting that for all intents and purposes, each platform had been placed on relatively equal footing configuration wise and the chipset differences were pretty much unavoidable. Below are the rest of the details for each test system.
AMD: Intel:
Conroe was 25% faster in DivX HD Video encoding and approximately 19% faster in MP3 encoding with iTunes, even at a 140MHz clock deficit versus the Athlon 64 FX-60 at 2.8GHz.
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| Media Encoding - Windows Media Encoder | ||||
Windows Media encoding showed a smaller advantage to Intel's Conroe Dual-Core on the order of about 15%, which is still impressive none-the-less.
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| Business Computing - PCMark05 | ||||
Synthetic in nature from a scoring standpoint but with standard every-day computing functions like file compression and decompression, PCMark05 shows Conroe to be about 21% faster than the 2.8GHz Dual Core Athlon 64.
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| Gaming - UT2004 | ||||
We stopped testing with Unreal Tournament 2004 long ago here at HotHardware but back in the day, AMD's advantage in this benchmark was unmistakable. The tables have turned decidedly now with Conroe on the horizon, which again shows greater than a 20% edge over an overclocked Athlon 64 dual-core and the fastest money can buy from AMD currently.
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| Gaming - Half Life 2 | ||||
Half Life 2's leading-edge DX9 driven game engine shows a greater than 25% advantage for Conroe. Once again, we're amazed and impressed.
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| Gaming - Quake 4 | ||||
Quake 4, single threaded and multi-threaded is next...
A 23 - 28% advantage in Quake 4 for Conroe, shows consistent, significantly better processing efficiency and horsepower over AMD's current generation Dual-Core CPU.
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| Gaming - F.E.A.R. And The Wrap-Up | ||||
We'll wrap up our testing with F.E.A.R. gaming benchmarks...
Conroe's largest lead yet is shown in these low resolution F.E.A.R. demo runs. This test at low res takes the burden off the GPUs and places it more significantly on the CPUs in the two test systems. You're looking at 46% more frame rate from the 2.66GHz Conroe system versus AMD's 2.8GHz overclocked Athlon 64 FX-60.
It's hard not to be extremely impressed with the performance we've been witness to in our early preview testing with Intel's new 65nm Dual-Core Processor, code named Conroe. Granted our test conditions were limited to only the systems Intel provided us and also the tests that Intel allowed us to run. Regardless, with the broad-scale thrashing we saw the overclocked Athlon 64 FX-60 take, it's also equally as hard not to view these test scores from any other perspective than their face value. And at face value, it looks like Intel is poised to change the face of the Desktop Computing landscape and potentially take back the over-all performance lead from AMD, perhaps more dramatically than we've seen in years. These are early samples of Conroe at work, that we were able to test. One can only imagine what a 3GHz Extreme Edition Conroe could do, should that product, or something along these lines, come to market later this year. Until then we wait with eager, aching anticipation for the coming of Conroe. Could Intel "bring it"? We think they very well could.
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