Conroe Discussion

[Nitestick]

i knew the conroe benchmarks were stacked in Intel's favour. Intel has never really released a reliable set of benchmarks. i like this guy he points out exactly what i've been thinking for quite some time but haven't wanted to say for fear some of the more ignorant forum members would flame the heck out of me.

They basically gave themselves the opportunity to ride in this time warp without giving AMD a chance to get in the passenger seat. Anytime you compare a future technology with an existing one you should expect to see some performance differences, but looking closer it seems as if they are comparing future technology with older technology, rather than current, in some respects.

that is one of the big points i've been trying to get across.

Next, when you take a future Intel chipset and compare it to a chipset that no enthusiast supports (RD480) with an outdated bios it’s like taking a Ferrari and putting it on Bias-Ply tires. It’s just not a good way to show off a “new” technology.

another major point. for crying out loud, the first thing i saw when i read the anandtech review was that they were using that crossfire chipset which would not do an AMD justice. i did not pick up the out of date BIOS though. once again this proves that Intel truly do control the best marketing department in the world. it annoys me thought that people were so quick to believe the information that had come out. clearly it was no accident that this info about Intel "outperforming" AMD came out.

 

[Nubius]

Just about every one of his arguments was answered with this:

http://www.anandtech.com/tradeshows/showdoc.aspx?i=2716

psht whatever. Intel was banned from japan for a month because of being cheats, a couple large lawsuits fairly recently, this is just another dent. They've got deep pockets, they've obviously paid of anandtech.

Besides, they never explain why this FX-60 seems to do worse than the FX-57 considering there are benches with a less powerful system doing closer to what conroe is "SUPPOSEDLY" doing here.

Though this isnÂ’t exactly conclusive, if you go back and re-read some old FX-57 reviews on TomÂ’s Hardware youÂ’ll see a benchmark for the same game set at the same resolution (and the same color depth), the FX-57 running at 2.8GHz scored 183.4fps. The thing is itÂ’s using an Nvidia Geforce 6800 GT which seems to me that there are many variables here when it comes to benchmarking. Perhaps it's somewhere locked in the settings, but I won't know until I sit down and compare our own benchmarks with consistant settings. Note that a single core Athlon 64 4000 achieved a better score in the benchmark run by Tom (160.5fps) than the one provided by Intel (160.4) at IDF. Like I said, I don't view this as conclusive, but it shows that there are variances depending on how the benchmark is setup. Here is a link to TomÂ’s review.

Lucy! You got some 'splainin to do!

 

[Apokalipse]

nobody's even seen what AMD will have by then, so saying that conroe is going to destroy AMD is very premature at best.

just remembering ATI X series video cards, a lot of people judged the ATI cards to be better. a lot of people were disappointed.

though just to clarify, I do not believe the conroe is a bad chip. I just hate it when people jump to conclusions like this.

 

[gaara]

Chipset is one of the biggest disadvantages/annoyances with Intel IMO, you need specific chipsets in order to use specific core revisions within the same socket LGA...whereas amd had socket 939 boards with nf3/nf4 chipsets that you could be sure would take any future 939 CPUs whether they be Athlon X2s or Opterons

 

[idiotec]

From the followup:

the RD580 chipset was not readily available over 2 weeks ago when the parts for this system were purchased

Each system also used a pair of Radeon X1900 XT graphics cards in CrossFire mode, the drivers and settings were identical across both machines.

CoolÂ’nÂ’Quiet was disabled on the Athlon 64 FX-60 system.

Some have tried to compare the results from these benchmarks to other results, using similar applications but different workloads. For example, our iTunes 6.0.1.3 test uses an input file thatÂ’s around 1/2 the size of the one Intel supplied us for these tests. The results in the game and encoding benchmarks are simply not comparable to anything outside of the two systems we have here.

We were able to test the impact of the new BIOS, and our results are below:

DFI LANPARTY UT RDX200 10/11/2005 BIOS 12/23/2005 BIOS
Quake 4 - 1280 x 960 (Avg Frame Rate) 207.5 fps 207.6 fps
F.E.A.R. - 1024 x 768 (Avg Frame Rate) 151.0 fps 158.0 fps
Windows Media Encoder 9 (Encode Time) 75 seconds 75 seconds
DivX 6.1 (Encode Time) 44 seconds 44 seconds
iTunes 6.0.1.3 (Encode Time) 73 seconds 72 seconds

The new BIOS also correctly identified the Athlon 64 FX-60 processor, although as you can see from the results above, the proper detection of the CPU didnÂ’t translate into greater performance.

So what is left? The chipset? Good luck on improving the performance by 20% with a new chipset.....

 

[Nitestick]

one thing that remains is that we are comparing a future processor to a current one. it is still based basically on hearsay

 

[idiotec]

one thing that remains is that we are comparing a future processor to a current one. it is still based basically on hearsay

But that is why they OC'd the FX-60 to 2.8Ghz, FX-62 speeds, which is scheduled to be the top chip from AMD at the time of Conroe's release. So, the only way to close this gap is through improved IPC and from what we know about AM2, nothing points to that being significant.

I know that none of this is certain since these chips are a way's off, but you have to go on the information you have, and right now that information points to Conroe significantly beating the AMD line.

 

[Nitestick]

no doubt that conroe is looking impressive but i will not believe a single thing i hear until i can compare a RELEASED AM2 processor and a conroe. so many people on this forum are hung up on what may be rather than what is

 

[Green Radience]

You could also underestimate it like we underestimated the 7900GTX by the hardware specs, and then it turns out to be better than we imagined.

 

[SomeIranianKid]

really so if i bought an opteron today i could use it with my Neo4-f? i didn't know that gaara thnx