Wednesday, March 08, 2006

Spring IDF 2006 Conroe Preview: Intel Regains Performance Crown

Intel is very excited about their new Core architecture, especially with Conroe on the desktop. It's not really news to anyone that Intel hasn't had the desktop performance crown for years now; their Pentium 4 and Pentium D processors run hotter and offer competitive or lower performance than their AMD competitors. With Conroe, Intel hopes to change all of that.

AnandTech managed to borrow a Conroe test system at IDF, and have some early benchmarks of the machine stacked up against an overclocked Athlon 64 FX-60. The tests show a 2.66GHz Conroe consistently beating an FX-60 at 2.8GHz, in some cases by up to 42%. The gaming results are especially interesting, as they show large performance gaps despite running at 1280x960 and 1280x1024 with high in-game detail levels.

Before you get too excited, we should point out that both test systems were configured by Intel. AnandTech says it couldn't find anything fishy going on, but this isn't quite independent testing with production hardware.

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