Would You Buy A Core 2 Duo System Today?

Why Didn't You Do

Clue69Less

"Agreed - mega impressive [benchmark results]. Why do you figure reviews like this have the Conroe OC'ed by 20% but the competition is run at stock clock? Tom's has had plenty of time to work out a good OC setup on the FX, so why run it stock?"

Patrick: FX-62 was overclocked when we reviewed it. We consider the overclocking results for Core 2 Extreme more interesting, as they give you an outlook on what to expect - should you decide to spend one grand on a CPU. Athlon 64 overclocking projects can be found all over the web.

Arexcedian

"I was surprised to see that they did not include the 4.1ghz PD805 in the test line up."

Patrick: It was a new setup and time was limited. We decided to focus on temperature and power of Core 2 instead. Again, check out the updated Interactive CPU Charts in few weeks please.

Geralt

No 64-bit testing with Vista arriving soon. Boring."

Patrick: Not all the benchmarks run properly on Vista and who runs 64 bit OSes or games today anyway? We would have been forced to do Vista benchmarks in addition to Windows XP. Again, our priorities were set for a broader audience.

JumpingJack

"Does your NDA allow you to confirm that the press kit you received actually came outfitted with a x-Fire board and cards?"

Patrick: Certainly. It was a motherboard and the two processors only (at least for the US). Intel might have bundled different review kits in other regions.

Torque79

"You know what I would find interesting? I would like to hear an editor's opinion of how much difference they notice when actually using the PC between say an A64 4400, and the newest core2duo."

Patrick: This opinion will probably depend very much on who you ask. I can tell you that such an upgrade would not provide any benefit to my everyday work, which I would call "resource-unintensive content creation". As long as I get any dual core and 2+ GB of RAM, I'm happy so far. If I want to play, I'd hijack somebody else's computer :-)
If you go ahead and ask someone else, they will probably tell you the contrary. Yes, there is a tremendous difference, but you need demanding applications to notice it. Since you even asked this question, you might not really need to upgrade.