AT Benches Core 2 X6800 (2.93 Ghz Conroe) vs FX-62

[deeznuts]

Originally posted by: mamisano
These are all Intel supplied systems that are being tested here, with OSes, etc installed by Intel.

I will wait until I see an IN-HOUSE comparrison from a reputible site before I pass judgement.

Intel marketing at work once again...

Anand built both boxes. Just posted.

classy, don't forget Intel apparently is holding back, hence not releasing the higher clocked 1333 Conroe. This might help them combat any onslaught by amd with their 65nm process.

 

[classy]

Originally posted by: deeznuts

Originally posted by: mamisano
These are all Intel supplied systems that are being tested here, with OSes, etc installed by Intel.

I will wait until I see an IN-HOUSE comparrison from a reputible site before I pass judgement.

Intel marketing at work once again...

Anand built both boxes. Just posted.

classy, don't forget Intel apparently is holding back, hence not releasing the higher clocked 1333 Conroe. This might help them combat any onslaught by amd with their 65nm process.

I just read Anand's post. I dropped a comment there, but to be honest I feel like Intel kinda fooled us all. Now it is faster, but looking at all the scores, it has an advantage but not this gaping hole we were led to believe. To me its a mixed bag in reality. I'll be buying one of the cheap 2 mb ones later on. But looks like I can buy an AM2 4000, oc it, and get top flight performance now rather than wait another 2 months. Good stuff though, real good stuff from Intel, but its not worth to continuing to wait for.

 

[rqle]

Firesquad seem to show a $300 2.4ghz beats AMD flagship $1000 FX62 2.7ghz CPU (though not as badly as its older 2.6ghz brother). So it already looks very promising on price alone.

 

[secretanchitman]

hmm, now it looks like the "40%" faster than an overclocked (or was it underclocked) FX-60/62 was a bit overhyped...well, at least it beats the FX in most of the benchmarks...especially gaming. gaming is basically the one area where i saw that it "slaughtered" (somewhat) the AMD.

though im still content and patiently waiting for the E6600 2.4Ghz and some nice DDR2-800 memory to go with it.

 

[kknd1967]

Just curious
I recalled during IDF, it was stated as "Conroe 2.67 is about 20% faster than 2.8G A64 X2". Where were those 40% expectation mentioned except SuperPi stuff?

 

[larciel]

yeah I agree with 'over-hype' just a little bit. Surely no one can argue that Conroe is better choice than X2, price-wise and performance-wise.

but really FX62 is running at less frequency than Conroe x (2.80ghz vs 2.93ghz) and the difference in some application isn't that big, once you run FX62 at same 2.93ghz, gap will close even more.

Good point the reviewer said is because of high demand of conroe predictable, we might see retail price that's higher than Intel's sheet states. I'm sure AMD can win some people back if they cut their price in right time.

My take is that while Intel got the performance crown back from AMD, the gap isn't that wide AMD won't be able to catch for couple years like some people said.

go competition! 🙂

 

[Supa]

In the original benchmark, if you still remember, the 20% performance advantage was achieved by E6700 (2.67) over 2.8 AMD.

Now the new 20% advantage was achieved by X6800 (2.93) over 2.8 AMD.

Not quite the same 20%.


If anything, the tightening of memory latency (5-5-5-12 in this test) can only benefit AMD a bit more.


---

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Originally posted by: Duvie

Originally posted by: Absolute0
3.5-4 Ghz on air is what it seems, so long as you have a high enough multi so that the FSB can get high enough. The cheapest conroes will top out around 3-3.2 Ghz due to FSB constraints.

Intels don't seem to correlate so strongly based on week/stepping, seems the higher ones just clock better. E6600 looks to be the mainstream choice for overclockers, looking into a 6700 for myself because the 10x multiplier makes 4+ Ghz possible.

That is my same line of thinking....

I was excited about the possiblity of a $200 monster, but based on this latest availability and pricing, it looks like there will still be reason to spend $300+ on a CPU; A. to get the higher OC potential, B. to get the larger ammount of cache. It seems that Core 2s below the E6600 all have 2M as opposed to 4 - which I'm betting that the difference would make a fairly noticable difference in performance.

 

[the cobbler]

Originally posted by: larciel
yeah I agree with 'over-hype' just a little bit. Surely no one can argue that Conroe is better choice than X2, price-wise and performance-wise.

but really FX62 is running at less frequency than Conroe x (2.80ghz vs 2.93ghz) and the difference in some application isn't that big, once you run FX62 at same 2.93ghz, gap will close even more.

Good point the reviewer said is because of high demand of conroe predictable, we might see retail price that's higher than Intel's sheet states. I'm sure AMD can win some people back if they cut their price in right time.

My take is that while Intel got the performance crown back from AMD, the gap isn't that wide AMD won't be able to catch for couple years like some people said.

go competition! 🙂

not only is the gap 'not that wide' but AMD looks to retain a clear advantage in gaming at higher resolutions and levels of AA/AF, where the icredible bandwidth of AM2 can really be used properly

I'd like to see some comparos with the AMD on tighter timings as well. also curious to see whether AMD is indeed planning the rumored 3.2 or 3.4ghz AM2 FX, which judging by this would actually best Conroe in high-res games, while still lagging behind in most everything else.

 

[JumpingJack]

Originally posted by: mamisano
These are all Intel supplied systems that are being tested here, with OSes, etc installed by Intel.

I will wait until I see an IN-HOUSE comparrison from a reputible site before I pass judgement.

Intel marketing at work once again...

Uhhhhmmmm, Anand stayed all night with parts smuggled in his suitcase, own card, own memory, own OS, own bench software --

We're happy to report that we gathered enough parts to build two systems while in Taiwan for Computex. We managed to acquire a Socket-AM2 motherboard equipped with an Athlon 64 FX-62 and a P965 motherboard equipped with a Core 2 Extreme X6800 2.93GHz at our hotel, along with two sets of 2x1GB of DDR2-800 (only 5-5-5-12 modules though), a pair of Hitachi 7K250 SATA hard drives, and two NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTXes (one for each system) - it helps that all the major players have offices in Taiwan. Of course we happened to pack some power supplies, monitors, keyboards and mice in our carry-on luggage, as well as copies of Windows XP, Quake 4, F.E.A.R., Battlefield 2, SYSMark 2004 and Winstone 2004.

What part of this was Intel? Or have you not "learnt how to read"?

 

[the Chase]

Gotta admit it- Conroe rocks. A big - Bravo!- to AT for stealing away the hardware for an all night thrash. That's a true enthusiast. Have to see how it all shakes out with the final retail price/performance. You have to figure in the motherboard pricing as well so depending on AMD price cuts and what you can OC each midrange chip to.... I myself would be very interested in the base model the 6300 for the higher multiplier and cheap price. Should be fairly easy to get 3GHz out of that chip on a so-so(cheap) motherboard.

 

[the Chase]

Originally posted by: JumpingJack

Originally posted by: mamisano
These are all Intel supplied systems that are being tested here, with OSes, etc installed by Intel.

I will wait until I see an IN-HOUSE comparrison from a reputible site before I pass judgement.

Intel marketing at work once again...

Uhhhhmmmm, Anand stayed all night with parts smuggled in his suitcase, own card, own memory, own OS, own bench software --

We're happy to report that we gathered enough parts to build two systems while in Taiwan for Computex. We managed to acquire a Socket-AM2 motherboard equipped with an Athlon 64 FX-62 and a P965 motherboard equipped with a Core 2 Extreme X6800 2.93GHz at our hotel, along with two sets of 2x1GB of DDR2-800 (only 5-5-5-12 modules though), a pair of Hitachi 7K250 SATA hard drives, and two NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTXes (one for each system) - it helps that all the major players have offices in Taiwan. Of course we happened to pack some power supplies, monitors, keyboards and mice in our carry-on luggage, as well as copies of Windows XP, Quake 4, F.E.A.R., Battlefield 2, SYSMark 2004 and Winstone 2004.

What part of this was Intel? Or have you not "learnt how to read"?

Uh- the AT article was added to the original post after mamisano posted that.....

Edit- But welcome to AT!😛

 

[thestain]

be nice to see the setting used for the test and just how much memory and memory bandwidth is being used in each of the test.

 

[Munky]

I thought the IMC on the AMD chips would at least help them catch up in gaming benches, but it looks like Conroe doesnt suffer from high mem access latency either. Although I dont plan to upgrade my s939 dually any time soon, it's still impressive to see Conroe consistently winning just about every benchmark.

 

[hardwareking]

amd's 4x4 idea,well i'm sceptical.
Will 2 am2 x2 5000's outperform a conroe XE,it may and it may not.
Then u got pay the extra for a compatable motherboard as 4x4 won't work on current motherboards(no duh)
And as far as anands reviews is concerned,through all the review sites i've seen on the net,there are a few i know i can really trust,and anandtech is in that list.
And why does the conroe struggle so much for bandwidth???Is it because of using fsb for all communication?

 

[larciel]

aren't you all curious how fast conroe will performe under real-time practical use?

I mean we haven't had new CPU having that much advantage over current ones. (northwood, amd64, pentium d, x2 .. they were almost neck and neck albeit few benches)

I can't wait to try conroe because I think it'll remind me when I first bought T-bird over p3.

 

[coldpower27]

Well I wasn't expecting Conroe to have more then ~ 20% advanatge per clock

Athlon FX 62 vs Conroe 2.4GHZ E6600 actually played out pretty even which is inline with my expectation, those 40% figures came from people who were expecting much more which intel themselves didn't say.

Unnfortunately we can't draw too much conlcusion yet as we still need to see the Crossfire benches anyway with both systems, it seems with only 1 GPU the difference is diminished.

 

[OneOfTheseDays]

i don't understand what all the hype is about conroe. I was fully expecting it to be faster than anything AMD has out there currently. The A64 architecture has been left virtually unchanged since its arrival, AMD has held the crown for quite awhile now.

I personally am going to hold out until K8L to upgrade, I honestly have more than enough CPU power to run all the applications I use so I see no real benefit in gaining an extra 20% performance.

 

[Markfw]

Well, even Anand says he will have a full set of benches coming soon, but as I said before, definitely looks promising. Also, price and availability we won't know for weeks on the inside, months on the outside. Keep your fingers crossed. If they are available for the prices listed ($316 for the 6600) I will have one the first day, even without benches, just so I can do my own.

 

[kknd1967]

Average of all application performance benchmark. Only exclude the Sysmark communication benchmark which is not very related to the CPU performance as the author mentioned.

Conroe looks pretty good 🙂. Basically match the IDF benchmark where 2.67G Conroe is 20% faster. 2.93G Conroe is 26.25% faster (takes about 5% hit due to sublinear scaling of performance in freq).


Conroe / FX62

Business Winstone 1.175
Sysmark office 1.26
Sysmark Doc 1.307142857
Sysmark Data 1.513513514
Multimedia Creation 1.057
Sysmark 1.273458445
Sysmark_3D 1.274052478
Sysmark_2D 1.287946429
Sysmark_web 1.256637168
Q4 1.238029146
FEAR_avg 1.178294574
FEAR_min 1.509433962
FEAR_max 1.141975309
BF2 1.202803738
------------------------------------------
avg speed over A64 1.262520544
IPC over A64 1.206504274

 

[Avalon]

Looks good, just like I expected. Although, I'm a bit disappointed to hear availability may be rough, and that the 800FSB variants won't be launching immediately. They looked like they'd be good overclocker's for really cheap.

 

[F1shF4t]

Originally posted by: Sudheer Anne
i don't understand what all the hype is about conroe. I was fully expecting it to be faster than anything AMD has out there currently. The A64 architecture has been left virtually unchanged since its arrival, AMD has held the crown for quite awhile now.

I personally am going to hold out until K8L to upgrade, I honestly have more than enough CPU power to run all the applications I use so I see no real benefit in gaining an extra 20% performance.

Same, And at this point upgrading to say a $300 conroe, $200 mobo and who the hell knows for ram, to get the Core 2 Duo E6600 which at stock would be similar in peformance as my current rig. So much money for so little gain, I dont think so. If i wanted gains i might as well get a x1900xtx but meh. 😛

Lets just say if AT's benchmarks are correct, all the hype has been for nothing, sure its quicker, but not the huge performance everyone has been claiming. Conroe beats AM2 just like AM2 beats presler, like almost the by the same ammount.

 

[n19htmare]

Originally posted by: Dark CupcakeSo much money for so little gain

Then I guess you havn't upgraded to "AM2".... now thats so much money for so little gain.

going to E6600, you'd gain a lot more than if you were going to AM2. Plus i can guarantee the E6600 would over clock a hell of a lot better than the X2-3800 (both in $300 price range).

 

[soydios]

I applaud AnandTech for going the extra mile and doing a totally independent benchmarking of Conroe Extreme vs. FX-62.

If I were building my system in 3 months, I would go with Conroe. But I'm building it as soon as I can find a DFI or Asus RD580 Socket AM2 motherboard.

 

[Polish3d]

Originally posted by: nyker96
looks like Conroe of same clock is about 15-25% faster than a AMD64 core. Pretty impressive, I wonder if the lowest clocked conroe will be so OCable as to make it a bit hit with OC community. If it turns out to be so, then I see a conroe in my near future. Love the competition. AMD time to do some research and catch up technologically!

and start dropping prices! I paid 600 bucks for my Athlon x2 last july