Are these benchmarks accurate?

There is not enough of a variation between the 555 and 965 in the benchmarks where the 555 wins to warrant an actual "win" over just variation.

As for the i5 and phenom II that does seem a bit odd. However, I find the game benchmarks rather useless since they don't tell us the rest of the system setup they were tested on.

the i5 is more for gaming out of the box, but if you OC the Ph II to high freq, it just nukes the i5, if you oced i5 vs Ph II, you will find that the i5 can be faster for games and only games, while the Ph II, being a true quad core would win at almost everything else, and it would make you be able to multi task better

 

Im pretty sure that the core i5 750 is a "true quad core" as well.

Anand is an Intel shill and whenever possible he will bend and twist benchmarks to make them look better.

A few years ago Anand's site was first rate.

Since he sold out to Intel I wouldn't trust anything posted on the site in terms of benchmarks.

In saying that, the i5 benchies for a number of games are stellar, and they make a great gaming rig ... just not the best, or the best value for money ... as they are still overpriced in many areas.

Once the volume increases ... the prices will drop ... they will become better value for money.

Thats just my view.

Note any benchies or reviews at THG from our German editors here are usually Intel biased as well.

The US / UK reviewers here are very balanced.

*** are you thinking?? comparing highly oced proc to a stock speedish 965 when they can hit 3.8 under air easy?!

btw toms you ate my post again with the censor

here is the post of them comparing a i5 500 at 4 GHz vs a 965 at 3.4 when they should be at least 3.8 if not 4

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=372...

the full post actually pointed out the differences between the chip and the insane comparison between a highly oced chip vs a lightly oced chip... i hate the censor thing on here

What MOBO and what RAM did they have the AMD on ? - they tend to put them on a crippled AM2+ MOBO with less and slower DDR2 RAM instead of using an AM3 MOBO with the same DDR3 RAM as the i5.

On the x2 955 - I believe they unlocked the cores on that chip successfully so it may be that the bench result you are looking at is the unlocked x2 955 making it perform like a P2 X4 !

whaaa amd don't make Ph II X2 955, there is only a X4 955 and a X2 550 and another few things

was a typo meant X2 555 (which unlocked shows up as a X4 B55!! From the first article I saw on Benches at the site since there wasn't a link in th OP

In those benchmarks, the i5 was running at 3.2GHz due to turbo boost, while the Phenom was running at 2.66GHz. If you want to accurately compare clock speeds, turbo needs to be disabled. It's a great feature, but it definitely needs to be off to accurately compare the i5 to other CPUs in terms of clock for clock performance.

As for the benchmarks the OP posted, they definitely do appear to be off. The i5 may be a bit ahead at stock speeds, but definitley not by that much. The rig setups were similar (you can see them by viewing any specific benchmarks individually). The only difference is that the Phenom was on Vista 32, while the i5 was on Vista 64. That almost certainly wouldn't make a huge difference in gaming.

Psycho know that full well Atranox, he's just trolling with his usual garbage 'clock per clock' comparison, which is actually a large clock speed boost for the i5 due to turbo.

i think the i5s and what nots may actually have a ipc advantage (from some time ago when they all did a same 3.6 ghz comp with no turbo and etc), but the issue is that we are talking duals vs quads, no matter how much ipc advantage you have, you will NOT win, if you crank a i5-600/500 to 4.5 Ghz (the max I have heard on air with standard chips) or a Ph II X4 to 4 Ghz (max i have heard on air with standard chips) the Ph II X4 will kick butt

compare a i5-600 to a 555 BE locked in at 2 cores, and i'd say your are not comparing the right price point and should be an i3 vs 555/550 BE, when you want to say well if i3 is oced it gets top, i say B55 + oc and end it there.

the low / mid end for intel is just miserable atm, if you are going to get a i5-750 and oc the hell out of it, then great, its a very good platform and it's going to be close to a i7-920, if you went with a i7-800, i'd slap you and say spend the tiny extra and get a i7-920 with a cheap board and oc to 4 Ghz, both solutions works and can hand amd it's own butt, but not at anywhere near the price point of a Ph II X4 955.

+1 to the holy guy.

His passionate expose pretty much sums up my view.

I wouldn't recmmend a dual core anymore for gaming ... now the newer titles are really making better use of the extra cores.

Unless it is a cheapy.

Then making silicon scream on an E5/ E8 series is far easier than those i3 / i5's and much cheaper ... albeit EOL.

It is most likely that the games on the hardware and resolution tested(which is low by the way) it is more cpu bound. All three of those titles you mentioned have the FPS continuing to go up with the higher end Intel's. The Intel's are faster when GPU is not the bottleneck.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/20100205073010...

Don't think anyone was saying TURBO is wrong they are just saying to downclock an AMD chip to run at a slower clock to supposedly get a clock for clock comparison while keeping the Intel Chips Turbo mode which OCs the CPU to a different clock rate makes the comparison no longer clock for clock - so either rerun the tests with the Turbo mode disabled so they both run at the lower clock rate or up the AMD clock back to the actual clock rate the Intel chip is running and you'll get different results !!

As it is it is like your ISP implementing Turbo Boost to your download so that when you run a speedtest it shows 20Mb\s because the first few seconds of your download are boosted only to have it slow to around 1Mb\s speed on your 5Mb\s connection after that so your small download takes forever but you can't complain because the line tested to speed according to our testing methods !! (but then since your an Intel fanboy you probably believe the speedtest and ignore real world results anyway !!)

B55 means an unlocked 555 Black edition.

The owner of the CPU unlocked it to a Quad Core. The 5xx Series black edition CPUs can be unlocked to a triple or quad core, a little risk with a large reward.

yes they are but it will be different result by an extreme user, you can beat that benchmark depending on your own build system.
benchmarks are just guides, not a bible.