What just happened to these forums? Is it just me or did all of the experienced users all the sudden turn into guilible fools since yesterdays 'preview'?
A disclaimer: Conroe is going to be good, it's going to be a good chip and will make Intel competitive again. However, you guys have all slipped into some kind of reality distortion feild, and I'm going to try to pull you all out of it.
Now lets get down to it. The fact that all the game tests but FEAR were set up by Intel is no coincidence, as FEAR is the only test that Intel didn't have to rig.
You see, you guys think you are seeing some sort of marvelous new architecture. You aren't. You are seeing a good architecture that is around par with AMD64 that has lots, and lots of cache. The thing you guys are forgetting here is that Conroe has a 4MB *resizable* cache. In single threaded apps, you are seeing a core with 4MB of cache all to itself. Look at Quake 4, and the huge drop in leadership over AMD when both cores need to share that 4MB of cache.
Now why don't you guys also take a trip in the 'way back machine' to the days of Quake 3. ID made an assortment of time demos, and the performance difference between these time demos could be huge. AMD or Intel could be winning by a significant amount depending on which timedemo was used. Now, ye foolish, remember that these are *Intel created* timedemos. Who knows how much they could have swayed performance in their favour? Anywhere from 10-40% could be possible, but I suppose no one knows besides the Intel guys who made the timedemos in the first place. So in single threaded game performance the two chips will likely be even, with perhaps a slight edge to Intel, but in multithreaded tests AMD should win by quite a bit still. Of course that excludes FEAR...
FEAR is *extremely* cache sensitive. Despite a 200MHz clock disadvantage, the 165 beats the 3800+ by a good margin, and don't forget that AMD64 *is not* very cache sensitive. Without an IMF, conroe is a lot more cache sensitive than the A64, and in this case has *4X the L2 cache* as the FX-60 does. FEAR gets no performance advantage from going to 1 to 2GB's of memory, so who knows, a very good portion of the game code might fit in Conroe's L2.
Also The BIOS, which dates from 2003, does not even recognize the FX-60... come on.
EDIT: Even though the bios says copyright 2003 its actually from 2005, and as Rahul Sood points out:
-That Bios *enables Cool 'n Quite by default
-According to DFI the FX-60 is not recognized *and does not function poperly* with this Bios
-2-1-1-1-1 and 4-1-1 Mode Wrong & Fix Read Preamble Table Error (!)
-Fix Fill 3114 SVID&SSID under Cross fire mode (! Crossfire bug !)
Last but not least, the systems use a *modified* video driver. Why on earth would Intel need this? The excuse that it's needed to recognize Conroe doesen't hold water (When have you ever had to update your video card drivers to recognize a new processor?!) and almost cries out optimization. And with ATI's drivers generally sucking (that latest OpenGL fix should have been fixed *years* ago), the recent skype 'optimizations', the fact that ATI is now making a lot of Intel chipsets and this, how can you possibly accept these seemingly extraordinary numbers at face value?
Something to think about.
There was no need for this bit of trolling.
AnandTech Moderator
A disclaimer: Conroe is going to be good, it's going to be a good chip and will make Intel competitive again. However, you guys have all slipped into some kind of reality distortion feild, and I'm going to try to pull you all out of it.
Now lets get down to it. The fact that all the game tests but FEAR were set up by Intel is no coincidence, as FEAR is the only test that Intel didn't have to rig.
You see, you guys think you are seeing some sort of marvelous new architecture. You aren't. You are seeing a good architecture that is around par with AMD64 that has lots, and lots of cache. The thing you guys are forgetting here is that Conroe has a 4MB *resizable* cache. In single threaded apps, you are seeing a core with 4MB of cache all to itself. Look at Quake 4, and the huge drop in leadership over AMD when both cores need to share that 4MB of cache.
Now why don't you guys also take a trip in the 'way back machine' to the days of Quake 3. ID made an assortment of time demos, and the performance difference between these time demos could be huge. AMD or Intel could be winning by a significant amount depending on which timedemo was used. Now, ye foolish, remember that these are *Intel created* timedemos. Who knows how much they could have swayed performance in their favour? Anywhere from 10-40% could be possible, but I suppose no one knows besides the Intel guys who made the timedemos in the first place. So in single threaded game performance the two chips will likely be even, with perhaps a slight edge to Intel, but in multithreaded tests AMD should win by quite a bit still. Of course that excludes FEAR...
FEAR is *extremely* cache sensitive. Despite a 200MHz clock disadvantage, the 165 beats the 3800+ by a good margin, and don't forget that AMD64 *is not* very cache sensitive. Without an IMF, conroe is a lot more cache sensitive than the A64, and in this case has *4X the L2 cache* as the FX-60 does. FEAR gets no performance advantage from going to 1 to 2GB's of memory, so who knows, a very good portion of the game code might fit in Conroe's L2.
Also The BIOS, which dates from 2003, does not even recognize the FX-60... come on.
EDIT: Even though the bios says copyright 2003 its actually from 2005, and as Rahul Sood points out:
-That Bios *enables Cool 'n Quite by default
-According to DFI the FX-60 is not recognized *and does not function poperly* with this Bios
-2-1-1-1-1 and 4-1-1 Mode Wrong & Fix Read Preamble Table Error (!)
-Fix Fill 3114 SVID&SSID under Cross fire mode (! Crossfire bug !)
Last but not least, the systems use a *modified* video driver. Why on earth would Intel need this? The excuse that it's needed to recognize Conroe doesen't hold water (When have you ever had to update your video card drivers to recognize a new processor?!) and almost cries out optimization. And with ATI's drivers generally sucking (that latest OpenGL fix should have been fixed *years* ago), the recent skype 'optimizations', the fact that ATI is now making a lot of Intel chipsets and this, how can you possibly accept these seemingly extraordinary numbers at face value?
Something to think about.
There was no need for this bit of trolling.
AnandTech Moderator
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