Now that core 2 duo is here..um do we want any thing else?

[Crixx_Creww]

Not a fan boy question or anything, but tonight i was looking @ the conroe on toms and looking at the fx 62 and the pentium ds.
Looking at the price performance and looking at over clockability.

Thinking yay yonah prices have dropped and so too have pentium D prices w00t and at first loving the idea of maybe getting a yonah for desk top but then comparing it to a e6300 which is in the price range and knowing what that processor is capable of.. is there a real want to get the cheaper priced pentium ds and yonahs and amd equivs or should we truly just go conroe?

Serious question.

[TriniXaeno]

well I just read the article myself and WOW!

AMD got totally pwned.

Those chips are ridiculous. I sure intel not gonna be allowed to sell any of those to Israel nor Lebanon nor any communist milititant islands in the north pacific run by ruthless dictators hellbent on world destruction.

but to answer the question, my rig won't be upgrading to conroe until I reach a CPU bottleneck...and even then I would probably spring for a chip only upgrade (meaning the fastest my mobo can support) before heading to Intel land.

Call me lazy but it saves the hassle of swapping out mobo, etc.

So long as the CPU only upgrade is dog cheap. (US$150.00 or so)

Any more than that and Conroe here I come!!

I'm still on socket 754 and there were US$300.00 chips around on socket 939 than were faster but the upgrade was not necessary cause none of my games were calling for more processing power.

That fact still remains.

I mean this thing is uber powerful but at US$300.00 it better be bringing something to the table other than a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

If my game is not gonna run noticeably faster, then it stays on the shelf. Still to be admired though for those blazing performance figures!

**edit**
Now I just read Anandtechs reviews: Intel Core 2: The Empire Strikes Back.

DAMN! Rise of Legends just goes wild with an E6600 processor under the hood. This is my current fav RTS and it does get noticeably slow with big battles on my current cpu. Chalk this up as first "excuse" to get a core 2.

Be warned, the E6300 (suspiciosly missing from the Toms Hardware review) looked poor.

Yes it matched the AMD 4200 and 4600 dual core processors that cost a bit more but it did not surpass them significantly. Not really worth the upgrade considering mobo and ram expense.

The E6600 on the other hand...definitely worth every penny

[Kaizen]

well the shop just got our shipment of core 2 duos .
10 lappies 15 pcs
sigh if i could test one of these bitches now

but stickin to the topic
crixx go with conroe one time
i was always looking @ the other procesors getting cheaper and my options then and in the end :S conroe or bust? 

[TriniXaeno]

what mobo and ram you using with those core 2 duos? and how much the ram and mobo costin?

[Crixx_Creww]

there are sub 100 dollar mobos for conroe on the 775
using ddr2

the e6300 is not a poor performer at all
the e6300 overclocks on air on these 775 boards by as much as 50% very very much stable. That is one of the best thing to look forward too. its sub 200 dollars, quoted at about 183 dollars and is an insane performer once oced that is gold!!.

and they also said that their is little performance difference between the 2 mb and 4 mb chips.
when the e6800 is clocked down to the e6300 speed, their is almost no performance diff with the presence of that 4mb cache. So the e6300 is a big big sleeper hit!!

[TriniXaeno]

Poor at stock.

Forgive me but I've long since stopped considering OC-ability in a gpu/cpu. One less thing to worry about when a game freezes up or crashes.

So the E6600 is the chip in my sights. Better safe than sorry immc.

great @ cheap mobo and ram. Still I'm curious to know which mobo and ram Kaizen using in particular. A tried and true combo. Last thing we want is some flakey mobo and dodgy ram spoiling the Core 2 experience.

[W1nTry]

I have read through quite a bit of reviews, including anandtech, toms, hardware analysis, etc, etc and yes conroe is defintely worth it, I would side with Baego on this one, go E6600 and be safe as opposed to OCing. You can always OC that to higher if OCing is just your thing. As for the Mobos on the other hand, i've read a handfull of strange occurences with the Extreme Ed. and with anything running RAID 5, that aside you should be safe from any strange occurences. I would still advise you to wait on the next revision of the core since that is supposed to eliminate all these issues and should be out by October if I recall correctly. Also I read in certain games eg. Farcry it took an unusally long time to load. Like all new releases, I say give it time to work out all the bugs. So by late Sept yuh good to go.

I forgot to mention 1 thing, ATIs chipset for Conroe (at least for now) is probably the best, definitely OCs the best, and well Nvidia hasn't released the Nforce 560 for Conroe yet (as far as I know) so your only choice for SLI/Xfire is ATI atm. I also read Intel will not officially support SLI on conroe.. so it'll have to be an Nvidia thing only, whereas I vaguely recall Intel allowing Xfire on Intel chipsets 0_o

[TrinireturnofGamez]

 Alot of 775 mobos dont' support conroes , but all new 965 and 975 chipset boards do, and a handful of 945 and VIA chipsets... but the best bang for buck comes with the 965 boards , which MSRP @ 130 USD for vanilla models , and 160 for models with 2 pci-e x16 slots ( sli anyone? , ableit 1 is a 4x slot)...
    E6300 '' poor at stock'' ? It beats the FX62 in one or two benchmarks , and generally ownz up to an amd X24400 ... Plus overclocking conroe is a different kettle of fish , you don't have to push much voltage or worry about cooling till you pass 3.6 ghz clocks , Intel left alot of headroom in clock just in case AMD pulls a rabbit out of a hat  ... It can do the same or greater clocks than P4 's were allowed to do due to 65nm process and a 14 stage pipeline  and consume less power at the same time .
 
   Check Xbit's  power consumption readings , even if you clocked the  E6300 up 1ghz , it won't consume any more power than an A64... no stress on psu or mobo..

[W1nTry]

Actually it'll be Xfire on 965 not SLI, I repeat, intel does NOT support SLI on conroe intel chipsets, only xfire. That aside, those numbers look a lil suspect as a video card by itself can draw that kinda power. What were the test rigs Trini? post the specs of the supposed rigs they used.

[TrinireturnofGamez]

   they do not support it.. but it works just fine  if you know what do..  Gigabyte includes an SLI bridge with one of its boards....

  the rig is listed as this for the test :

    * CPUs:
          o AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 (Socket AM2, 2.8GHz, 2x1024KB L2);
          o AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ (Socket AM2, 2.6GHz, 2x512KB L2);
          o AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ (Socket AM2, 2.4GHz, 2x512KB L2);
          o AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (Socket AM2, 2.2GHz, 2x512KB L2);
          o AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Socket AM2, 2.0GHz, 2x512KB L2);
          o Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (LGA775, 2.93GHz, 1067MHz FSB, 4MB L2);
          o Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (LGA775, 2.66GHz, 1067MHz FSB, 4MB L2);
          o Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (LGA775, 2.4GHz, 1067MHz FSB, 4MB L2);
          o Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 (LGA775, 2.13GHz, 1067MHz FSB, 2MB L2);
          o Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (LGA775, 1.86GHz, 1067MHz FSB, 2MB L2);
          o Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965 (LGA775, 3.73GHz, 1067MHz FSB, 2x2MB L2);
          o Intel Pentium D 945 (LGA775, 3.4GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2x2MB L2);
          o Intel Pentium D 915 (LGA775, 2.8GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2x2MB L2);
          o Intel Pentium D 820 (LGA775, 2.8GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2x1MB L2).
    * Mainboards:
          o ASUS P5W DH Deluxe (LGA775, Intel 975X Express);
          o ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (Socket AM2, NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI).
    * Memory:
          o 2048MB DDR2-800 SDRAM (Mushkin XP2-6400PRO, 2 x 1024 MB, DDR2-800, 4-4-4-12).
    * Graphics card: PowerColor X1900 XTX 512MB (PCI-E x16).
    * HDD: Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB (SATA150).
    * OS: Microsoft Windows XP SP2 with DirectX 9.0c.

 Not thats the power consumption of the proc only ... the whole rig would draw close to 200 watts.

[Crixx_Creww]

thats the point i was making about the e6300 baego

no need to have a fear of ocing on these babies

do yu realise that these processors are running fanless and running cooler than a64s?
When they oced the e6300 they said that the didnt even need to add a fan, but just for the sake of arguament they did.

so of course my rig is gonna have a sicko heatsink and a big nice duct extractor fan for the case and  its gonna be perfectly safe!

i MEAN my 6800 is oced and runs on stock fan cooling in my dell.
It shouldnt even be able run on my 300 watt system far less oced but it runs smoothly.

And the ocing of the conroe is different from other oc methods, yu dont have to increase the voltage to get the increase, just the fsb, which they safely razed to 500 mhz very stable, they said that with the 965 boards, they will be able to raze the fsb even higher and also the voltage.

Its an over clockers dream.
Over clocked to 3.2ghz on nothing more than a fan(which was not even needed)

[TriniXaeno]

That OC does not require super hi fi wide axel double overdrive tiptronic DRAM modules?

[TrinireturnofGamez]

  nope , intel boards work fine with ram dividers ,and DDR 667 is fairly cheap ,  stock conroe FSB runs 1 to 1 with DDR 533 , you can overclock a good bit  1 to 1 with 667 , and even more with a divider .... Plus DDR 2 overclocks easily once you loosen timings

[Crixx_Creww]

corsair has some 1024 mhz ddr2 that iam looking forward to getting for a conroe rig

[Kaizen]

oh @ baego not sure man its dell pcs lol
havent gotten down there to try them out yet

[W1nTry]

Plus DDR 2 overclocks easily once you loosen timings

You mean to higher than CAS 4 and 5.... yuck...

[richjob]

All this is nice.  In benchmarks, the Intels are faster.  No question.

It's nice as an option (as a competitive Intel spurs AMD innovation on and vice versa) but I'm not convinced that the real world jump is there as yet.

If I do a lot of video encoding, yes.

Gaming?  I'm not all that convinced that this is of any huge benefit in other than an online *ic*waving benchmark contest.  Real-world bumps not noticeable yet.

I'm STILL on socket 754, like Baego.  I did the math, and not going 939 made sense.

Maybe my next buid will be an AM2, maybe Intel Core Duo or whatever crack the CPU companies push at the time.

Being a cheap creole, i love the idea of getting ridiculous amounts of computing power and speed for next to nothing.

[Narcissus]

Now that core 2 duo is here..um do we want any thing else?

ummm world peace?...sry fuh spammin up de thread i just like AMD alot

[TriniXaeno]

lol @ world peace

Yeah Rich, agreed.

Also I've been doing a bit more encoding of late thanks to the ridiculously easy to use "Fair Use" wizard.

takes about 2-3 hours to encode a typical dvd but rather than upgrading cpu to cut down the time, I simply run it overnight and couldn't be bothered. Not in a big rush.

If I got a good number of 'em to do, then the work is dished out over a few machines overnight (The HQ GamePCs moonlighting as a video studio, lol)

But I could understand if you do that sort of thing for a living, then Core 2 would be the second coming for ya.

Power idmc.

[Prowl]

Sorry just had to




Conroe puts intel back on top and I hope amd can get their act together with k8l on time but it's obvious, for a while they are out of the top end game, with ATI the can go platform like intel does with their own chipsets and now gpus. Now lets hope we get faster gpus and less of these dual slot needing their own power supply monsters.

now where did that dfi Nf590 intel edition board go.......... BTW Nf4 supports sli on intel, asus and dfi have 'em now, nf590  to follow



Oh and if u think encoding video is bad, try rendering mpeg2 for dvd from edited minidvd, we're takling days, so more cpu power works for me.