E6600 takes on the X2 5000+ for gaming

[The_Abyss]

No synthetic benchmark rubbish, just what we all do best.

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/365/1/

The limiting factor of the GPUs really does shine through in every review we see now. It would be great if the new cards from both ATI and Nvidia put the onus right back onto the CPU but we'll have to wait and see - I haven't seen a sniff of a whiff of a hint of the performance of the new cards.

edited typo in thread title

 

[Weeble]

Interesting article, thanks.

Makes the issue if you were building a machine with a gaming emphasis right now (rather than say in a couple of months when things are more developed on the Conroe front) closer in actual money to layout terms than some fan boys on either side would have you believe. Puts the emphasis back squarely on AMD's price point.

A lot of the current what to buy situation depends on motherboard availability, processor pricing and what GPU you can afford to run.

I feel fortunate I can wait to see Conroe and AMD2 be more 'like for like' in terms of the hardware to support them, for those wanting to go either one right now its not as easy to decide (if the AMD2 is cheap enough). Conroe is certainly ahead but are the few frames worth the extra if the system costs a significant amount more? Maybe for people who only play games.

The GPU limitation is very distorting. It would be interesting to see a comparison with both running a lesser card (with the proviso everyone knows thats not a 'true' CPU test), just to see what happens and whether things would scale down in direct proportion.

 

[icbluscrn]

Nice find. Thanks was looking for something like this hope they do it again with lower model conroe
been trying to tell a friend to stay away from the high end/new cpu's
Isnt this normal? i mean for a gamer 1st thing is buy the best video card you can afford then worry about the cpu, Beacuse really how many people can afford to buy 1900xtx 7900gtx and keep upgrading video cards.
wont it be better to have a something ike a amd 3700 with a 1900xtx then a conroe with x850
a strugging video card will hurt more then a bottlenecking cpu right?

wonder what it would have looked like with a 6800ultra or 7800gt.

 

[Caboose-1]

That is what I have been waiting for.

 

[Heyyou27]

Sort of like HardOCP's, but not as biased.

 

[biohazard420420]

From my understanding of the bottlenecks when it comes to gaming it works like this please correct me if im wrong. But what I understand is this, when you are gaming at a lower resolution say anything below 1024x768 res the bottleneck will tend to be on the cpu end. But if you are running at higher res say anything higher than 1024x768 the bottleneck tends to be on the video card end. so theoretically you could get the same performance with a stronger cpu and weaker video card in low res as you would with a weaker cpu and stronger video card in high res. That is at least what my understanding is so if you wanna play high res put more money in the video card and less in the cpu and vise versa.

 

[ocnewb]

The next question will be how much will overclocking come into play. I must admit thats one of the features i look for ina new CPU. As Im sure most of us do in these forums. I dont know how well the 5000+ OC's or the 6600, but from what i hear, all the Core 2 Duo chips OC like mad.

 

[ltcommander_data]

Yes, Jakub Wojnarowicz at FiringSquad for one seems to have taken offense for HardOCP's implication that everyone not running games at high resolutions were misrepresenting products. He writes a rant on the subject here:

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/jakub_rant_real_world_benchmarking/

FiringSquad runs their benchmarks at both low resolution and high resolutions and single card and dual card configurations.

In case anyone missed it and is still interested they also ran a followup article on Conroe like many other websites have done and looked at the effect of memory bandiwdth and latency on performance.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/core_2_memory_tuning/

Legit reviews should also do a head to head for the E6400 and the X2 4600+ since they are priced the same.

 

[RichPLS]

And next week those prices are gonna be . . .

$282 for the X2-5000 and

$316 for the E6600,
actual estimated street price by THG article.

 

[RichPLS]

And am quite shocked that LMM and BM were right about the price dropping so low, I did not think it would go down this low!

 

[MattC]

The next question will be how much will overclocking come into play. I must admit thats one of the features i look for ina new CPU. As Im sure most of us do in these forums. I dont know how well the 5000+ OC's or the 6600, but from what i hear, all the Core 2 Duo chips OC like mad.

The answer to your overclocking question is known only by intel people. The CPUs sent out for reviews were *absolutely* *100%* cherry picked. Intel would be foolish not to pick the best chips yielded so far, as they know people will try to OC.

To ward away the annoying intel fanboys who constantly prattle on about how anyone who says anything bad about intel is an AMD-Fanboy, I myself am planning on getting a core2 - after the technology matures a little. They look like awesome beasts, and I would bet a bit that, however the average core 2 OC's at launch, they will OC quite well 6 months from now, after they've had a little time to deal with the huge demand and perhaps refine their process a little. Just a wild guess though, really.

 

[turpit]

Yes, Jakub Wojnarowicz at FiringSquad for one seems to have taken offense for HardOCP's implication that everyone not running games at high resolutions were misrepresenting products. He writes a rant on the subject here:

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/jakub_rant_real_world_benchmarking/

FiringSquad runs their benchmarks at both low resolution and high resolutions and single card and dual card configurations.

In case anyone missed it and is still interested they also ran a followup article on Conroe like many other websites have done and looked at the effect of memory bandiwdth and latency on performance.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/core_2_memory_tuning/

Legit reviews should also do a head to head for the E6400 and the X2 4600+ since they are priced the same.

Very informative and interesting link. Thank you for posting it

Peace

 

[angry_ducky]

I don't understand why they didn't run the tests at 640x480 to show the difference in the CPUs. The one test that they run at 1024x768 shows the E6600 killing the 5000+ by 20FPS. I know that noone plays at those crazy-low resolutions, but they still show the difference in the CPUs.

 

[RichPLS]

If intels ES chips were cherry picked as you claim, why are not hordes of customers who have already recieved Conroe posting benchmarks contridicting the early reviews? It is because the performance got better with the retail chips, according to the reviews, and overclocking has been 3.4 to 3.6GHz on air with stock cooling and voltage... which is excellent in my opinion.

 

[BaronMatrix]

No synthetic benchmark rubbish, just what we all do best.

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/365/1/

The limiting factor of the GPUs really does shine through in every review we see now. It would be great if the new cards from both ATI and Nvidia put the onus right back onto the CPU but we'll have to wait and see - I haven't seen a sniff of a whiff of a hint of the performance of the new cards.

edited typo in thread title

You forgot to say and loses. We all know the Core 2 is faster than the same clock X2.

I don't feel bad because maybe I won't be using Craptiplex next year. I got access to an 875 system so SCREW Dell andINTEL.

 

[jkflipflop98]

The next question will be how much will overclocking come into play. I must admit thats one of the features i look for ina new CPU. As Im sure most of us do in these forums. I dont know how well the 5000+ OC's or the 6600, but from what i hear, all the Core 2 Duo chips OC like mad.

The answer to your overclocking question is known only by intel people. The CPUs sent out for reviews were *absolutely* *100%* cherry picked. Intel would be foolish not to pick the best chips yielded so far, as they know people will try to OC.

To ward away the annoying intel fanboys who constantly prattle on about how anyone who says anything bad about intel is an AMD-Fanboy, I myself am planning on getting a core2 - after the technology matures a little. They look like awesome beasts, and I would bet a bit that, however the average core 2 OC's at launch, they will OC quite well 6 months from now, after they've had a little time to deal with the huge demand and perhaps refine their process a little. Just a wild guess though, really.

The parts sent out to review sites are the exact same parts that are being sent to Dell, HP, Levono, and your favorite local computer hobby shop. Get over it. Intel wins. AMD loses this time. Considering Intel has made superior parts for the last 30 years, minus the K8 era, you shouldn't be so surprised.

Here's your ticket, please stand in the long line to the left.

 

[the_vorlon]

No synthetic benchmark rubbish, just what we all do best.

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/365/1/

The limiting factor of the GPUs really does shine through in every review we see now. It would be great if the new cards from both ATI and Nvidia put the onus right back onto the CPU but we'll have to wait and see - I haven't seen a sniff of a whiff of a hint of the performance of the new cards.

edited typo in thread title

In games and/or resolutions and settings where the CPU makes a difference, Conroe spanks the Athlon pretty good. In situations where the CPU doesn't matter, the CPU doesn't matter

 

[biohazard420420]

I only have one thing to say and this applies to a pretty old system. I am not AMD fan boy since I have only owned to computers since I was 18 the first was a Pentium II 200Mhz and then when I upgraded I had more money to spend and bought an AMD 1Ghz Thunderbird which I still use at this moment although I am going to be buying a Core2Duo in the next few months. But that aside the chip I am running right now has managed to hold out all this time, not a big suprise since I don't over clock but I am still able to run most all current games I have tried as well as ALOT of multitasking which is what I and I am sure most people do. I can browse the web listen to mp's, download files and programs, watch vid's and (shameless plug ahead) run seti@home in the background flawlessly. All on a 1Ghz cpu and 512 MB PC100 ram. I have to say this AMD does manage to make a good product, at least that is if they have managed to keep up quality wise which from what I can read they have. I am buying a Core 2 Duo for my new pc mainy for the price to performance ratio, but AMD does a good job even if they have got beat by Intel. With even a modest cpu you can run most games, just not at super high res or all bells and whistles running. You just have to go for what you looking for.

 

[MattC]

The next question will be how much will overclocking come into play. I must admit thats one of the features i look for ina new CPU. As Im sure most of us do in these forums. I dont know how well the 5000+ OC's or the 6600, but from what i hear, all the Core 2 Duo chips OC like mad.

The answer to your overclocking question is known only by intel people. The CPUs sent out for reviews were *absolutely* *100%* cherry picked. Intel would be foolish not to pick the best chips yielded so far, as they know people will try to OC.

To ward away the annoying intel fanboys who constantly prattle on about how anyone who says anything bad about intel is an AMD-Fanboy, I myself am planning on getting a core2 - after the technology matures a little. They look like awesome beasts, and I would bet a bit that, however the average core 2 OC's at launch, they will OC quite well 6 months from now, after they've had a little time to deal with the huge demand and perhaps refine their process a little. Just a wild guess though, really.

The parts sent out to review sites are the exact same parts that are being sent to Dell, HP, Levono, and your favorite local computer hobby shop. Get over it. Intel wins. AMD loses this time. Considering Intel has made superior parts for the last 30 years, minus the K8 era, you shouldn't be so surprised.

Here's your ticket, please stand in the long line to the left.

I hate to flame, but you're just so dry and easy to set on fire ....
You should really reread my post, fanboy. I didn't deny that the conroe is better. Obviously it's better - just like the average 10 year old's reading comprehension is superior to yours. Since you can't read between the lines (or even IN the lines) I will say it a little more clearly (not for your benefit - for the fanboys who will read this later) - I am not an AMD fanboy. The 64 bit amd cpus rocked, but before that Intel was the way to go, except in some budget situations at certain times.

For the non-fanboy's reading these posts and trying to make heads or tails of these posts:

Athlon 64s and x2's rocked.
Now Conroe rocks (much, much more!), and Intel appears to have regained the crown (I'd say it was inevitable)

Meanwhile, everytime someone says something the least bit bad about either AMD or Intel, the annoying chitter-chatter of fanboys seeks to overwhelm the useful discourse on the subject.

 

[xombie2000]

I think it would have been interesting to see a E6400 vs 5000+.

 

[snooze2]

The next question will be how much will overclocking come into play. I must admit thats one of the features i look for ina new CPU. As Im sure most of us do in these forums. I dont know how well the 5000+ OC's or the 6600, but from what i hear, all the Core 2 Duo chips OC like mad.

The answer to your overclocking question is known only by intel people. The CPUs sent out for reviews were *absolutely* *100%* cherry picked. Intel would be foolish not to pick the best chips yielded so far, as they know people will try to OC.

To ward away the annoying intel fanboys who constantly prattle on about how anyone who says anything bad about intel is an AMD-Fanboy, I myself am planning on getting a core2 - after the technology matures a little. They look like awesome beasts, and I would bet a bit that, however the average core 2 OC's at launch, they will OC quite well 6 months from now, after they've had a little time to deal with the huge demand and perhaps refine their process a little. Just a wild guess though, really.

The parts sent out to review sites are the exact same parts that are being sent to Dell, HP, Levono, and your favorite local computer hobby shop. Get over it. Intel wins. AMD loses this time. Considering Intel has made superior parts for the last 30 years, minus the K8 era, you shouldn't be so surprised.

Here's your ticket, please stand in the long line to the left.

I love you people who just scan each post for people who say anything nice about AMD, don't you have something better to do? i'm pretty sure he is aware conroe is better than anything AMD has to offer which he has indicated from his post.

 

[chuckshissle]

I think it would have been interesting to see a E6400 vs 5000+.

I would choose the E600 the fact that it's uses less watts, less heat and it's 2x4Mb L2 cache.

I want to see the E6300 ( currently the best-bang-for-the-buck cpu) against the X2 3800+.

 

[mickeddie]

The e6600 can be overclocked a lot more than the X2. I don't know how many people OC (I never did but will with my new build) so I do not know if that should be a factor in comparing the 2 cpu's for GAMING.

 

[clue69less]

In the sciences or engineering, data is sacred, the description of the experiment is tantamount and any scientist proven to have published purposefully inaccurate data would face a) peer induced professional suicide and b) the end of their career in most all forms. As a conscience consumer, if this practice of biasing the test conditions for a review such that a predesired result is achieved, I have received nothing good the reviewer. If this practice is allowed to take place without repercussion, then at some point when do I stop trusting what I can read at any review site. At some point there must be accountability, and as such a site such as this must receive some form of professional 'slap in the face' for pulling such a stunt, if anything to provide a deterant from other sites doing the same thing and ensure itegrity in the data and conclusions. This goes regardless of the company reviewed, if the same crap is pulled against K8L on it's release I will be just as vocal, it is simply not ethical. Period.

HardOCP has no credibility, nor do they deserve any, in my opinion.... my mouse will no longer click to their site and neither should yours.

Yes indeed. Without critical review followed by publication of the critique, the system stalls and becomes useless. Unfortunately, there are and will continue to be those that fail to follow the scientific method and allow their bais to dictate the outcome of their nonresearch. Many philosophers believe that greed has destroyed science and although I don't think that's true, I do know that we are not applying enough funds to pure research.

 

[clue69less]

And am quite shocked that LMM and BM were right about the price dropping so low, I did not think it would go down this low!

Hey, you can't hide behind that TINY font!

The law of supply and demand lives! It cares not about whether AMD posts good Q3 earnings...