Conroe Processor - Core Duo 2 out in July

> > > Conroe Processor - Core Duo 2 out in July

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Czar of Turd Polish
Member Since: Jun 20, 2006

I'm not sure how much everyone keeps up on processors but this is a great month in computing history. Intel is releasing it's conroe (Core Duo 2) processor line which is finally going to take back the crown from AMD.

The beauty of this is, they are dual core (I believe coming out with 4 next year) with 4mb L2 Cache and scream through all audio or video encoding tasks.

And a great thing is, if you are running an intel board for socket 775 (later pentium 4 models use this) you can most likely upgrade with only a bios update.

And the greatest part ever.... the price is great, it uses less wattage, and for about $350 (E6600) you get similar power of previous $1000+ processors like the recent P4 Extreme or the FX62.

And just on a nerdy gamer side note : I run a 3.2 HT currently but have 2x7800GTX cards in SLI. As you can imagine my CPU is indeed my bottleneck, I'm getting the E6600 which will tear through all my games and my audio tracks also, wooo hooo!!!

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Czar of Midi
Administrator
Since: Apr 04, 2002

Jul 06, 2006 09:19 pm

Nice, but I'm still gonna stick with my AMD's. Although my trusty old Intell PIII chip is still running rock solid and I cant complain I have not had great success with any other Intell chips performance wise.

I will however do the geeky thing and check it out at my favorite hardware store.

Are you sure its gonna be $350.00? That sounds like a dream coming from Intell. The pirces I saw for pre-oreder were much higher then that.

Uh Oh, I just read a little blurb about the conroes sucking at multithread task's. That might not work for me and my software synth habit.

I also cant find any indpendant testing yet. And why didnt them benchmark against the X2, they were using the FX-60 and the X2 can outperform the FX-60 for Daw use by a long shot. I noticed as well the MoBo was not a direct corss either, they had some reason why.

But for the gamer I thin it might snatch some sales back form AMD, as long as it can overclock like an AMD with out exploding like some of its other chips have.

I'll wait paitently. But good find indeed my friend.

Czar of Turd Polish
Member
Since: Jun 20, 2006

Jul 07, 2006 12:01 pm

The E6600 is around $350.00 which is the second best chip for the non extreme editions. The best non-extreme being the E6700 at about $500. I would agree that the P4, P4HT, and PentiumD were big letdowns as would just about anyone else, but even the AMD fanboys are talking now :)

I'm glad you mentioned the P3, because they built both the Pentium M and the Conroe on similar architecture. Also since conroe is so low wattage on it's 65nm process it will be both a laptop and desktop processor!!! I would not swap if I had AMD right now, but I was poor and dell offered me financing so I have an intel :) (I got 40% off an XPS600, yay!!!)

But yeah, even the E6600 is scoring slighty under or over the new dual core AMD X2-5000 and the FX 62.

Toms did a good litle writeup of the E6700 vs FX62. I paid particular attention to the audio and video encoding times although the game scores were nice also.
www.tomshardware.com/2006...onroe_vs_fx-62/

Another from tweaktown with more processors compared but I hate the color coding scheme.
www.tweaktown.com/article...re_2/index.html

Czar of Midi
Administrator
Since: Apr 04, 2002

Jul 07, 2006 05:07 pm

Ya, I saw the gaming side scored real well. Although its the boyz that game, not me. I prefer my PS2 2nd generation over the PC games right now. But if I were to build another game box for the boyz I might steer to the Intell as long as none of their games run with multi threading. My favorite shop had an X2 5000 running overclocked with a dual N-Videa card set up on it and it was absolutely screaming fast. They also had one of the slower X2's on and it also was faster then anything I have seen yet.

I just did a system with the X2 4800+ for a small studio running Sonar 5 PE without tweaking the system at all and it blew my stripped down system away running the soft synths.

I haven't seen the FX-62 run yet though. But I did notice the socket AM2 seemed to be the choice to run with the AMD processors.

I am still going to be patient and wait untill the battle gets into full swing and places like Tweakbench and others get to build their own systems to run benchmark on. That will tell the true story. I dont trust either AMD or Intell to give absolute true specs on their benchmarks. But I know the X2 seems to be still an overclockers dream. I've heard of a couple run at over 300% increase and staying pretty stable. But I dont think I would ever risk running overclocked on a system that is my bread and butter.

Thanx for the links as well. I browsed them quickly but will have to go back and read the full stories.

Noize

Czar of Turd Polish
Member
Since: Jun 20, 2006

Jul 07, 2006 07:07 pm

Np, I'm a nerd, I know.

Like I said, I definitely would not jump ship as both new lines are processors are fantastic. The main reason this makes me super happy is the intel caught up and I already have a supported board.

That X2 4800 system sounds awesome, I honestly cannot wait to behold the potential of a faster dual core system. Although everything nowadays beats the P3 450 I used to dink with in 2000 :)

Oh yeah, overclocking, I also do not even dream of it, although the conroe has had blazing results in the overclocking forums. Bumping from 2.6 to 3ghz is quite common and the super geeks have already hit 4 Ghz on pre-release models.

Czar of Midi
Administrator
Since: Apr 04, 2002

Jul 07, 2006 09:12 pm

Oh ya, geek's are us!

I never really admitted to being one untill I met dB and a few of the other cronies of the time. But now its my kids that wont admit to being geeks even though they are allready in that stage.

As for my PIII, it is a 667 Coppermine chip. When it was new I ran it overclocked for a short while. But my old Athalon K6 550 actually ran faster with a minor clock tweak. But the 667 is still running in my sruf box here and it still runs several older versions of Sonar and Pro Audio as well as Project 5 version 1 and some odd software synths I cant part with. So I simply run it in sync with the newer AMD box and all is good. But it is a good steady and faithfull running box so I hate to part with it. And besides, I pulled off some huge projects on that box so it has sentimental value as well.

As for the overclocking, I will have to search again and find the bit on it but someone allready tweaked out an X2 to run past the 10 gig mark. It didnt state how long, just that it made that speed. I find it hard to believe, but having seen what some of these guys get those AMD's to run at as well as Intell chips I suppose its entirely possible.

Member
Since: Jul 02, 2003

Jul 08, 2006 02:11 am

I'm getting ready to buy a new computer and have been holding off till conroes available. I've bought Intel based computers mainly for the chipsets, VIA chipsets turned me off of ever giving AMD a shot, now that NVidia makes a chipset for them I might reconsider.

I don't put much weight in benchmarks, especially these days, the differences are usually so miniscule it's not even worth putting it into the equation.

Dan

Czar of Turd Polish
Member
Since: Jun 20, 2006

Jul 08, 2006 03:57 am

I hear ya, in most situations it is rarely much difference and I just get the best deal I can. In this case though, I think the $350 cpu's that I was looking at (E6600 and X2 4200) will be pretty substantial.

I run alot of effects on up to 16 tracks including drumahog, I need all I can get for my bucks :)

Side note, Nvidia chipset is fantastic. I had the NF3 Ultra with a 3200 before I got the new rig. I actually sacrificed speed (quite noticable too) by going to the intel 3.2 but I wanted SLI and dell financed me :)

Czar of Midi
Administrator
Since: Apr 04, 2002

Jul 08, 2006 11:34 pm

OD, my MSI MoBO runs the Nvidea chip and it is much more stable then my older AMD set ups. I dont seem to have much issues with things like overloading with the soft synths the way I used to. And things like the Perfect Space and Lexicon reverbs dont seem to hog as much as I though they would. AS for running FX and such. I have one project now running my Vintage warmer on 10 tracks and 4 instances of the Perfect space reverb and acouple software synths and I'm barely pushing past the 50% CPU mark. Granted 2 gigs of RAM help, but I will give a lot of credit to the chipset as it is what controls the CPU and memory pipe.

Czar of Turd Polish
Member
Since: Jun 20, 2006

Jul 09, 2006 09:17 pm

Yup, that's the kind of enviornment I need right there noize. My P4 3.2 doing multiple reverb channels along with other effects just kills my poor cpu :(

Czar of Midi
Administrator
Since: Apr 04, 2002

Jul 09, 2006 10:27 pm

That is why I am so hesitant to switch out of the AMD set up. I have had nothing but good luck and good performance with it. Granted, there is nothing running on that machine but audio/video. But I have to admit the video end got a bit odd a couple of times. I have to take some blame though as I was really pushing a lot of behind the scenes processes and didnt let the machine catch up enough before dumping more edits on it.

Czar of Turd Polish
Member
Since: Jun 20, 2006

Jul 10, 2006 12:06 pm

I only wish I had a dedicated machine. But since the theft, this is the last computer in the house. So it's the "everything" machine :(

Although, I'm sure the wife will have no problems with me getting a dual xeon setup with ECC Ram and a scsi Raid5 drive setup 2 months before the baby is born :)

Czar of Midi
Administrator
Since: Apr 04, 2002

Jul 11, 2006 07:44 pm

I honestly wouldn't bother with the SCSI Raid set up at all. Use the SATA drives, much cheaper and absolutely just as fast. I actually had my SATA drives striped to raid and switched them back to seperate drives as it worked just as well and didnt call upon the radi utility all the time to keep them in order.

Czar of Turd Polish
Member
Since: Jun 20, 2006

Jul 12, 2006 07:35 pm

Yeah, if I were really gonna do raid, I would just stripe without parity using some of the 10k rpm serial drives and backup frequently.

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