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
Gaming Performance using F.E.A.R. & Rise of Legends
Our F.E.A.R. test should be fairly familiar by now, as it is the built in performance test included with the game. Computer settings were left at "Maximum" while the graphics settings were set to "High" with the resolution cranked up to 1600 x 1200. F.E.A.R. ends up still being more GPU than CPU bound at these settings, even with a pair of X1900 XTs at its disposal, but we do see some separation among the processors:
The top three spots still go to the top three Core 2 CPUs, with the E6300 falling around the level of the X2 4600+. A trend that we've been seeing all throughout this review is that the performance of these CPUs effectively falls into three groups: Core 2 processors at the top, Athlon 64 X2s in the middle and Pentium D at the very bottom of the charts. In a sense that's the easiest way to classify these three groups of processors: if you want the fastest it's Core 2, mid-range goes to the Athlon 64 X2 and if you don't like good performance there's always the Pentium D.
Rise of Legends is a newcomer to our game benchmark suite and what an excellent addition it is. This Real Time Strategy game looks very good and plays well too; it serves as good filler until the next Command & Conquer title eventually arrives for those looking for a RTS fix. We ran with the resolution set to 1600 x 1200 and the graphics settings set to the medium defaults. We recorded a custom playback of a 3 vs. 2 multiplayer battle and played it back at 4x speed, recording the average frame rate for 10 minutes of the battle. The 10 minutes we focused on contained a good mix of light skirmishes between opponents, base/resource management with very few characters on the screen and of course some very large scale battles.
As with most RTSes, Rise of Legends is extremely CPU bound. The performance variability between runs was fairly high in this test, mainly because of how disk intensive the playback can get. Differences in performance of up to 5% should be ignored, but the standings are correct - the Core 2 line of processors absolutely demolish the competition: you're looking at true next-generation CPU performance here. The E6300 isn't nearly as impressive when compared to its more expensive siblings, but when you compare it to AMD's lineup it looks very good, especially considering its proposed cost.
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invise - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
According to page 3 "The Test", you used an Intel D975xBX motherboard (Intel 975X chipset) for the tests in the article. Yet in the picture of the Tuniq Tower on page 18 "Overclocking", there is clearly an Asus board with a gold/copper chipset heatsink, blue PCI-Express 16x slot, and alternating yellow and black DIMM slots. Which board is this? I suspect a P5WD2 or P5N32-SLI, just from looking at pictures online, but from what I can find neither of those has a gold/copper heatsink on the Northbridge.I'm curious because you got the board's FSB stable at 445 MHz, which is critical when working with a CPU with a low, locked multiplier. If any other users recognize the board please ID it.
spug1 - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
I noticed that too Invise. Can we have some clarification as to whether you used the intel board, or the asus p5w-dh for the testing of conroe?!
cheerz, :)
JarredWalton - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Overclocking was done with the ASUS board. The benchmarks scores were tested on the Intel board as reported on page 3.Suraj - Friday, October 20, 2006 - link
What other parts did u change when overclocking? I'm very eager to know what exact parts u used when overclocking the e6600.Kiste - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Great review, as always. I have to admit though that I was hoping for a bit more with regard to i965 based mainboards.Gary Key - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
We have a few P965 boards in house currently, however all of them are undergoing almost daily bios changes. They should be very solid from a performance viewpoint within 30 days but at this time they are still immature and any performance results shown with them are not final.
Wesley Fink - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
You will see Conroe motherboard reviews the first of the week, and yes, there are 965 boards in the reviews.DrMrLordX - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Could you guys please do a mini-review of this chip? In particular, could you overclock it using a Tuniq Tower 120 or something and give us some idea of how high it will go? I've been wanting to know more about that proc since AM2 launched, but AMD has been doing a lousy job of getting them into retail channels.redpriest_ - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Very detailed, I loved it. But quick question: Your screenshots with cpuid have the stepping as a B1 stepping 5 Conroe - I bought a retail Conroe X6800, and it was a stepping 6 revB2 - and it "only" clocks to 3.466 ghz stably. 3.733 is unstable and 4 ghz is a no boot into Windows; so my question is - is that the stepping you used or was it just a screenshot from an older comparison?Wesley Fink - Friday, July 14, 2006 - link
Our review samples are all Stepping 5. We also have an earlier Stepping 4 unlocked E6700 that overclocks very well. We understood stepping 5 was the Retail stepping. We will clarify this with Intel later today.