Intel's Core 2 Extreme & Core 2 Duo: The Empire Strikes Back
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 14, 2006 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Application Performance using SYSMark 2004 SE
We'll kick off our look at general application performance with SYSMark 2004 SE and as always, and we'll look at the overall score as well as the scores in each of the two suites - Internet Content Creation and Office productivity.
As we saw in our last preview of Intel's Core 2 Extreme processor, it posted SYSMark scores that were well beyond anything either AMD or Intel had been able to deliver in the past. With the final version of Core 2 silicon in our hands and a more stable/tweaked platform, we got even better numbers out of Conroe:
At the high end, the Core 2 Extreme X6800 was just under 36% faster than the Athlon 64 FX-62. In fact, even the $316 E6600 was around 18% faster than AMD's fastest. To add even more insult to injury the slowest Core 2 Duo in the test, the 1.86GHz E6300 is barely slower than AMD's fastest Athlon 64 X2.
The old Intel lineup of Pentium D processors is truly an embarrassment. Only the Extreme Edition 965 is remotely competitive and even then it can barely outperform the $183 E6300.
Drilling down into the SYSMark scores we've got the overall ICC results, which honestly are not much different than the overall scores we saw above. The Core 2 Extreme X6800 holds a 29% performance advantage over the FX-62 and once again, and the E6600 is able to outperform AMD's best by over 8%.
Intel's Core 2 performance domination continues in the Office Productivity portion of SYSMark 2004, with the Core 2 Extreme X6800 maintaining a 42.5% performance advantage over the FX-62. This time around, even the E6300 manages to remain competitive with the FX-62. This is Intel's new $183 part offering performance equal to that of AMD's $1,000 flagship FX processor; it's going to take a lot for AMD to recover from this deficit.
The individual SYSMark 2004 SE scores are graphed below if you're interested. The data is used in calculating the overall scores we've already discussed above:
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
202 Comments
View All Comments
defter - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Xbitlabs has a great E6300 review:http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2...">http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2...
Overclocking was limited by a motherboard, but they still managed to achieve 2.94GHz with 420MHz FSB, not bad from a <$200 chip. E6300@2.94GHz was way faster than Athlon64X2@3GHz.
Frackal - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
4ghz Conroe, holy shiatAndrewChang - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Loved the title, and loved the article. Can't wait till the Return of the Jedi...JackPack - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Jedi is considered to be weakest film of the three....formulav8 - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Yeah, but the Emperor WAS overthrown. :)Anyways, good job on the review. Intel is definitely trying to almost GIVE those PD cpu's away it seems. $93? Not that I don't blame them. They would almost HAVE to give them away to get rid of them.
Jason
haugland - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Page 18:According to the prices on page 2, the price for the 2.4GHz E6600 is $316, while the 2.13Ghz E6400 costs $224.
mobutu - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
I quote:"The 2.4GHz E6600, which outperformed the FX-62 in most benchmarks at stock speed costs $223, and overclocked to 4Ghz with excellent air cooling"
It costs $316 according to Intel charts. Please fix it.
10x
JarredWalton - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Fixed (also for post below).mi1stormilst - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
I was like skimming throught the article and thinking to myself wow. Then I went back and looked at the benchmarks and realized that until I see benchmarks with a wider range of video card and cpus I will reserve my excitement. At the moment my $120.00 used 3200 venice running at 2600MHZ with an X1800XL gives me some very good performance.JarredWalton - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
I http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=279...">looked at performance with several CPUs using a 7600 GT (slower than X1800XL, but not by a huge amount). Basically, on lower end GPUs you will be GPU limited and just about any fast CPU. Maybe not always with NetBurst, but K8 and Core2 will be more than sufficient for all but multi-GPU setups (until next gen GPUs arrive).