Mad props to the boys at Intel for a wicked sick CPU, and you chaps here at Bit-Tech for a quite nice review.
Competition drives the market. That's really what it comes down to. I'm probably not going to upgrade to Conroe, simply because I don't have the money to play uber-system-of-the-week. If my system was a generation older, however... I'd probably be upgrading to a Conroe in less than a month.
Wow. Intel is taking back the crown by force. Glad I got my Abit AB9 Pro on the way right now. Think I will grab myself an E6600. For a $300 cpu to match or exceed a $1000 dollar cpu in som cases, or coming barely under it...is amazing.
Dunno what to say to conroe because everyone has said it all already. The one that got me was the price!!! I think the architecture will definately be around for awhile!
LOL, Since I am still running a socket A rig, all I can say is...time for an upgrade? :D rar...rar...!
Originally Posted by Da Dego Iago, I see where you're coming from, but you fail to note a crucial thing. Best playable settings stuff (like we do for graphics cards) is used BECAUSE graphics cards are the key determinant in any of that.
If you want huge gaming performance increase, buy a new graphics card, not a new chip. If your system needs an overall boost, then Conroe beats the AMD line by more than 30% in cases, for a lot less money.
I guess I see what you're saying, but honestly if Tim reviewed the way you're discussing, it would be way worse and introduce considerable bias. You need to try and remove the graphics acceleration from the equation to determine how much the CPU will improve things, that won't be done by doing "best playable," all the weight will fall right back on the graphics cards. You'll also see everything bunch right back up again with little to no difference, because the graphics card makes all the difference in higher resolution or higher effects processing.
Basically, by doing what you're describing above, we'd utterly bury the CPU's performance in graphs that mean next to nothing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tim S Iago, I do see where you're coming from and that is why I made reference to the fact that performance in games at high resolution (i.e. GPU limited) is not necessarily going to improve when you add a faster processor into the equation.
We didn't do 'best playable' for Conroe because we think it is beyond the scope of the review..
I see your points, and can't really disagree with them. I'm fully aware of the GPU bottleneck in normal resolutions with modern games. Furthermore, what Da Dego says about the bias it's true...the guys from HardOCP are already getting more than enough "AMD-biased" flaming for their article.
My point was that I love Bit Tech graphic cards review 'cause instead of just a pile of numbers, I know I can get a real, accurate feeling of how my experience is going to improve or not if I get a new 300 card. That's why I like HOCP's too...FRAPS benchmarks and the like are fine, but I really can't tell the difference between 50 and 60 FPS (wich is normally labeled as *huge advantage* every time you read a GPU review).
So, I expected some similar comments when Conroe arrived. Being the notable improvement over last generation CPUs it is, and with all the hype is surrounding it, numbers and synthetic benchmarks alone don't do it...I really need to know if, say, substituting my trusty X2 for one of those is going to give me some kind of *wow!!!* feeling when I turn the rig on, if I'm going to really notice having a faster system on my day to day, or it's just going to be a underwhelming experience. That's something I really miss from most reviews.
Still, as I said before, I too understand that my expectations were probably a bit unrealistic. There's really no way to accurately measure Conroe's improvements without devoting serious resources to number crunching ;) I didn't want my initial comment to come like I was bitching at the review at all...
Originally Posted by Iago Still, as I said before, I too understand that my expectations were probably a bit unrealistic. There's really no way to accurately measure Conroe's improvements without devoting serious resources to number crunching ;) I didn't wanted my initial comment to come like I was bitching at the review at all...
Clarification understood :) I guess that's the problem with CPUs. We're dealing with such a multi-component system that it's difficult to simply isolate something so integral without essentially nothing more than a big table of numbers.
I dunno, in my opinion a CPU making most things in your computer run 5-10% faster IS a big improvement, much less 30% and up for some things. The numbers are just that, numbers...but they also point to how well the system is going to function under general loads, various software situations, etc. It's not like a graphics card, though, like you mention...you can't see that you can now enable 3 more effects and still get a 5-10% framerate increase. But imagine everything you do getting a boost, and it really adds up.
That's the thing with CPUs...they're not the pretty or bling components, they don't really make your game look much better or your movies play with a better picture. If anyone has any ideas on benchies that would illustrate this sort of thing more easily, so you can see at a glance what pickup you'll really experience, I'm sure we'd be interested to hear.
That's the thing with CPUs...they're not the pretty or bling components, they don't really make your game look much better or your movies play with a better picture. If anyone has any ideas on benchies that would illustrate this sort of thing more easily, so you can see at a glance what pickup you'll really experience, I'm sure we'd be interested to hear.
As far as I know, there's none ;)
But for the review in sites I trust, the reviewer's word usually is enough for me. In you personal experience (I'm assuming you've had some time with a Conroe PC...please correct me if I'm wrong), did you feel any improvements in speed and responsiveness (is that a word? )when using it? I mean, does the PC seem to start up faster, do .rar archives decompress/compress noticeably faster, are program installs a breeze...?
I guess than decoding a DVD with DVD-Shrink must be way faster, but other than that, I'm not much into video editing. Do you think you'd be able to tell if a system has a, say, X2 3800 or Core 6400 in a blind test?
So far, whenever I've changed a CPU in the past, I've been able to tell the difference easily. My first partial disappointment was dropping a PIV 3.4 Ghz for my current X2 4200...yeah, the temperatures dropped (that on itself was very imporant for me at the time, but it's quite close between X2 and Core right now), but other than that, it didn't feel like a great improvement at all. For all the hyped AMD gaming advantage, I learnt the hard way that CPUs are close to irrelevant in gaming, and AMD dual core didn't feel much different than PIV hyper-threading in day to day use (perhaps those coming from single core Athlons noticed it more)...in most of my daily uses, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference (save for the noise levels required to keep the PIV in check). Would it be any different if I went back to Intel now? Of course, if I built a rig right now, there'd be no contest at all, but for those of us that love to have cutting edge parts and already have a modern CPU, could it be worth taking a look at Core?
I'm AMD fanboy and I'm glad this is happening. Looks like AMD will have to go back to the old days where their CPU's were dirt cheap and competitive. This will definetly help CPU's to advance and improve.
And the thing I'm most curious about is what innovation will AMD bring to battle. I myself believe that AMD will not go for RAW power. They'll probably just add some 'magical' memory controller or something else to improve CPU's integration with other components.
Originally Posted by DougEdey Bindibadgi: What infered is trying to say is: "Has anyone stress tested these for extended periods of time in a high useage environment?" We all know that CPUs can fail and since core is an entirely new arcitecture there are inherantly a LOT more risks of problems.
Thats ridiculous......I'm pretty sure INTEL did that.....FOR ABOUT TWO YEARS! They are the worlds biggest CPU manufacturer for god sake. Just because AMD held the "Gamers Choice" award for so long everyone thinks INTEL are totally incompetent.
Originally Posted by Da Dego That's the thing with CPUs...they're not the pretty or bling components, they don't really make your game look much better or your movies play with a better picture. If anyone has any ideas on benchies that would illustrate this sort of thing more easily, so you can see at a glance what pickup you'll really experience, I'm sure we'd be interested to hear.
Thats like saying a 512mb 7900 GTX and an Intel 486 will allow you to play FEAR with suitable frame rates. Of course the processor matters.
As for not being bling components since when did owning one of AMD's FX processors not at to your bling factor?
Originally Posted by zr_ox Thats like saying a 512mb 7900 GTX and an Intel 486 will allow you to play FEAR with suitable frame rates. Of course the processor matters.
As for not being bling components since when did owning one of AMD's FX processors not at to your bling factor?
You're making an absurd analogy. The technologies are completely incompatible. But any system that could house 7900GTX is likely to be able to play fear at a halfway decent framerate, because that would be PCI-E. The best a better CPU gets you is a few frames once you start turning on the eye-candy.
Drop an FX-62 in, in place of a 3800+. And guess what? You'll gain maybe a couple frames. Actually, you can look at one of the graphs in this review to illustrate that exact point, with those exact CPUs! :)
If you're even in the same LEAGUE of CPU, the majority of games will play well or poorly depending on your graphics card instead. That was both Iago's point and my counterpoint. That doesn't mean there's no benefit to an FX-62 over a 3800+, it just means that benefit is not in massively superior framerates of games.
For me this is perfect timing. I'm no Intel / AMD fan either way. I've usually made my purchasing decisions based on the "best bang for my buck" angle. Conroe / Core 2 is the direction I'll be going as I'm looking something that gives me an all around performance increase in everything I do, i.e. dual core or hyper threading. I've been thinking about moving from my Opty 148 to either a Athlon X2 (3800+ was pushing my budget) or an Pentium D (930 was priced just right) in the next few months. The answer was an easy one for me, upgrade to a dual core processor for $500.00 (Intel) or $700.00 (AMD). Even if AMD cut's price's Core 2 looks better to me since it will be an improvement over my Opty. <- my 2 cents.
tbh zr_ox, Da Dego has a point. A friend of mine still uses socket 754 AGP system and he's happy with the way it runs. He put in 1 of those 7800 AGP cards and the frame rate he got was quite close to the equivalent PCI-E card (4-10 frames less). He can run oblivion pretty well @ 1280x1024...still chops a little bit but I'm guessing that's due to the AGP bus being a bit poo than PCI-E. With today's shader heavy games, Im not really surprised either.
The processor does matter somewhat though, obviously it has to work-out collisions, AI, physics, etc. etc. When I put the same 7800AGP in my system (with an Athlon XP 2000+ socket A) , Oblivion didn't run so hot :/ Again, I reckon it's due to the outdated AGP bus/CPU to northbridge interconnects more than anything else though. The GPU *does* send/recieve data from the CPU!! =]
Originally Posted by zr_ox Thats ridiculous......I'm pretty sure INTEL did that.....FOR ABOUT TWO YEARS! They are the worlds biggest CPU manufacturer for god sake. Just because AMD held the "Gamers Choice" award for so long everyone thinks INTEL are totally incompetent.
Yea, absolutely. I cant understand why people are picking holes. Intel have been developing Core for YEARS most likely. They dont ship CPUs unless they know bloody certain they will work for a while. People are still using Pentium Pros in servers and stuff, that's 11 year old CPUs on "inferior" process technologies still going.
there is nothing worth arguing. Intel > AMD. thats it, period. if you think AMD will serve you well with gaming, then go buy it. No one really cares. it doesnt change the fact that core is better than AMD.
Originally Posted by modster there is nothing worth arguing. Intel > AMD. thats it, period. if you think AMD will serve you well with gaming, then go buy it. No one really cares. it doesnt change the fact that core is better than AMD.
Whoa!!!!!!! slowdown Fanboi! Nobody said Intel was better than AMD, At this current juncture Intel has the upper hand due to the "core" being newer than AMD's A64's....but look at the huge chunk of Intels business AMD took away from Intel. Intel is roughly 10times the size of AMD yet AMD achieved such a huge blow to Intel.
Also If you think that the "core" is the end all to AMD then you've got another thing comming, K8L will be out soon enough and well shall see how the low wattage A64's all to look forward to. Also People expected HUGE performance increases yet there where low 30%'s. People expected to be a final hammer blow but the reality is that Intel have finally caught up to AMD and have now evened the playing field. Obviously their newer hardware will be faster than AMD but it wasnt the HUGE ammount people were predicting.
I have to give it to Intel tho, they over came their demons and fixed all the problems they faced with their P4's....slow hot and inefficeient cpus and now thing of the past for these guys, now the real race starts.
i never said intel will always be better than AMD. its an endless race, amd will surely catch up one day. but at this point, core is the best out there and you cant deny it. who cares about which company is bigger? a better product is a better product. just look at what people said about stress test and stuff. those are some real nonsense. and please dont get me wrong, i ain't a intel fanboy. i am on an amd 4400 right now.
I don't have an FX series AMD. I don't have a duel core AMD. I don't have an Intel Core Processor.
Conroe is the next gen chip for intel. AMD on the otherhand have another socket in the works, and it's pretty well known now that socket AM2 is just a stepping stone to bigger and better.
I'm waiting for the next gen AMD chips before making a choice of my next rig. For now, i'm happy with what I have...it does college work, it plays games.
Ladies and gentleman, please raise your glasses, for the soon to come battle between the sucessor of AM2, and Core 2.
Originally Posted by Brooxy I don't have an FX series AMD. I don't have a duel core AMD. I don't have an Intel Core Processor.
Conroe is the next gen chip for intel. AMD on the otherhand have another socket in the works, and it's pretty well known now that socket AM2 is just a stepping stone to bigger and better.
I'm waiting for the next gen AMD chips before making a choice of my next rig. For now, i'm happy with what I have...it does college work, it plays games.
Ladies and gentleman, please raise your glasses, for the soon to come battle between the sucessor of AM2, and Core 2.
Let's hope it's a good one ;)
Intel is likely to have the next evolution of the Core architecture by the time K8L arrives ;)
Originally Posted by Iago But for the review in sites I trust, the reviewer's word usually is enough for me. In you personal experience (I'm assuming you've had some time with a Conroe PC...please correct me if I'm wrong), did you feel any improvements in speed and responsiveness (is that a word? )when using it? I mean, does the PC seem to start up faster, do .rar archives decompress/compress noticeably faster, are program installs a breeze...?
I spent quite a bit of time using the E6400 in some general computing scenarios - my normal work system is an X2 3800+ with 2GB of RAM. File compression was noticably quicker, as was Photoshop CS2 creating some article images off a dSLR. Windows installation seemed rather sharp, but then I can't remember the last time I installed windows on an X2 3800+-powered machine. Most of the time, I'm installing from something with an FX-60/62, etc installed. General OS snappiness was not really any different (if I take into account that my work machine is on a dirty OS that's nearly a year old).
Quote:
I guess than decoding a DVD with DVD-Shrink must be way faster, but other than that, I'm not much into video editing. Do you think you'd be able to tell if a system has a, say, X2 3800 or Core 6400 in a blind test?
So far, whenever I've changed a CPU in the past, I've been able to tell the difference easily. My first partial disappointment was dropping a PIV 3.4 Ghz for my current X2 4200...yeah, the temperatures dropped (that on itself was very imporant for me at the time, but it's quite close between X2 and Core right now), but other than that, it didn't feel like a great improvement at all. For all the hyped AMD gaming advantage, I learnt the hard way that CPUs are close to irrelevant in gaming, and AMD dual core didn't feel much different than PIV hyper-threading in day to day use (perhaps those coming from single core Athlons noticed it more)...in most of my daily uses, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference (save for the noise levels required to keep the PIV in check). Would it be any different if I went back to Intel now? Of course, if I built a rig right now, there'd be no contest at all, but for those of us that love to have cutting edge parts and already have a modern CPU, could it be worth taking a look at Core?
It's a tough question and it ultimately depends on your need. If you're a heavy CPU usage man (i.e. lots of photoshop/video encoding/audio encoding/distributed computing/folding) I'm sure that you're going to notice big improvements. If I was just looking at replacing my X2 3800+ with a Core 2 Duo to browse the internet, I'd save my money.
I doubt I'll be rushing out to upgrade my work system at the moment either, because it does everything fine at the mo'. Albeit a little slower than a mid-to-high end Core 2 Duo would...
Comments 51 to 75 of 106
ReplyCompetition drives the market. That's really what it comes down to. I'm probably not going to upgrade to Conroe, simply because I don't have the money to play uber-system-of-the-week. If my system was a generation older, however... I'd probably be upgrading to a Conroe in less than a month.
the conroes are good but not as good as people expected to be. Atlest intel have caught up to AMD.
LOL, Since I am still running a socket A rig, all I can say is...time for an upgrade? :D rar...rar...!
I see your points, and can't really disagree with them. I'm fully aware of the GPU bottleneck in normal resolutions with modern games. Furthermore, what Da Dego says about the bias it's true...the guys from HardOCP are already getting more than enough "AMD-biased" flaming for their article.
My point was that I love Bit Tech graphic cards review 'cause instead of just a pile of numbers, I know I can get a real, accurate feeling of how my experience is going to improve or not if I get a new 300 card. That's why I like HOCP's too...FRAPS benchmarks and the like are fine, but I really can't tell the difference between 50 and 60 FPS (wich is normally labeled as *huge advantage* every time you read a GPU review).
So, I expected some similar comments when Conroe arrived. Being the notable improvement over last generation CPUs it is, and with all the hype is surrounding it, numbers and synthetic benchmarks alone don't do it...I really need to know if, say, substituting my trusty X2 for one of those is going to give me some kind of *wow!!!* feeling when I turn the rig on, if I'm going to really notice having a faster system on my day to day, or it's just going to be a underwhelming experience. That's something I really miss from most reviews.
Still, as I said before, I too understand that my expectations were probably a bit unrealistic. There's really no way to accurately measure Conroe's improvements without devoting serious resources to number crunching ;) I didn't want my initial comment to come like I was bitching at the review at all...
I dunno, in my opinion a CPU making most things in your computer run 5-10% faster IS a big improvement, much less 30% and up for some things. The numbers are just that, numbers...but they also point to how well the system is going to function under general loads, various software situations, etc. It's not like a graphics card, though, like you mention...you can't see that you can now enable 3 more effects and still get a 5-10% framerate increase. But imagine everything you do getting a boost, and it really adds up.
That's the thing with CPUs...they're not the pretty or bling components, they don't really make your game look much better or your movies play with a better picture. If anyone has any ideas on benchies that would illustrate this sort of thing more easily, so you can see at a glance what pickup you'll really experience, I'm sure we'd be interested to hear.
Nice article you guys!
As far as I know, there's none ;)
But for the review in sites I trust, the reviewer's word usually is enough for me. In you personal experience (I'm assuming you've had some time with a Conroe PC...please correct me if I'm wrong), did you feel any improvements in speed and responsiveness (is that a word? )when using it? I mean, does the PC seem to start up faster, do .rar archives decompress/compress noticeably faster, are program installs a breeze...?
I guess than decoding a DVD with DVD-Shrink must be way faster, but other than that, I'm not much into video editing. Do you think you'd be able to tell if a system has a, say, X2 3800 or Core 6400 in a blind test?
So far, whenever I've changed a CPU in the past, I've been able to tell the difference easily. My first partial disappointment was dropping a PIV 3.4 Ghz for my current X2 4200...yeah, the temperatures dropped (that on itself was very imporant for me at the time, but it's quite close between X2 and Core right now), but other than that, it didn't feel like a great improvement at all. For all the hyped AMD gaming advantage, I learnt the hard way that CPUs are close to irrelevant in gaming, and AMD dual core didn't feel much different than PIV hyper-threading in day to day use (perhaps those coming from single core Athlons noticed it more)...in most of my daily uses, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference (save for the noise levels required to keep the PIV in check). Would it be any different if I went back to Intel now? Of course, if I built a rig right now, there'd be no contest at all, but for those of us that love to have cutting edge parts and already have a modern CPU, could it be worth taking a look at Core?
And the thing I'm most curious about is what innovation will AMD bring to battle. I myself believe that AMD will not go for RAW power. They'll probably just add some 'magical' memory controller or something else to improve CPU's integration with other components.
Thats ridiculous......I'm pretty sure INTEL did that.....FOR ABOUT TWO YEARS! They are the worlds biggest CPU manufacturer for god sake. Just because AMD held the "Gamers Choice" award for so long everyone thinks INTEL are totally incompetent.
Thats like saying a 512mb 7900 GTX and an Intel 486 will allow you to play FEAR with suitable frame rates. Of course the processor matters.
As for not being bling components since when did owning one of AMD's FX processors not at to your bling factor?
Drop an FX-62 in, in place of a 3800+. And guess what? You'll gain maybe a couple frames. Actually, you can look at one of the graphs in this review to illustrate that exact point, with those exact CPUs! :)
If you're even in the same LEAGUE of CPU, the majority of games will play well or poorly depending on your graphics card instead. That was both Iago's point and my counterpoint. That doesn't mean there's no benefit to an FX-62 over a 3800+, it just means that benefit is not in massively superior framerates of games.
The processor does matter somewhat though, obviously it has to work-out collisions, AI, physics, etc. etc. When I put the same 7800AGP in my system (with an Athlon XP 2000+ socket A) , Oblivion didn't run so hot :/ Again, I reckon it's due to the outdated AGP bus/CPU to northbridge interconnects more than anything else though. The GPU *does* send/recieve data from the CPU!! =]
Yea, absolutely. I cant understand why people are picking holes. Intel have been developing Core for YEARS most likely. They dont ship CPUs unless they know bloody certain they will work for a while. People are still using Pentium Pros in servers and stuff, that's 11 year old CPUs on "inferior" process technologies still going.
Nature: It's not pentium M at all, it's core 2.
Also If you think that the "core" is the end all to AMD then you've got another thing comming, K8L will be out soon enough and well shall see how the low wattage A64's all to look forward to. Also People expected HUGE performance increases yet there where low 30%'s. People expected to be a final hammer blow but the reality is that Intel have finally caught up to AMD and have now evened the playing field. Obviously their newer hardware will be faster than AMD but it wasnt the HUGE ammount people were predicting.
I have to give it to Intel tho, they over came their demons and fixed all the problems they faced with their P4's....slow hot and inefficeient cpus and now thing of the past for these guys, now the real race starts.
Conroe is the next gen chip for intel. AMD on the otherhand have another socket in the works, and it's pretty well known now that socket AM2 is just a stepping stone to bigger and better.
I'm waiting for the next gen AMD chips before making a choice of my next rig. For now, i'm happy with what I have...it does college work, it plays games.
Ladies and gentleman, please raise your glasses, for the soon to come battle between the sucessor of AM2, and Core 2.
Let's hope it's a good one ;)
I'm not that impressed really. The equally priced Conroe is really only a few fps faster than my Opteron.
I'm hoping there will be an overclockable MATX board out soon.
I doubt I'll be rushing out to upgrade my work system at the moment either, because it does everything fine at the mo'. Albeit a little slower than a mid-to-high end Core 2 Duo would...
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