Intel Core 2 Duo & Extreme Review --- TheThirdMedia Hardware

Test Setup

New technology is always a great read, but we're very sure that you're pretty much jaded from listening to product hype on how one feature or another would revolutionize the market as we know it. Yes, we've heard it all too and if we didn't get a hands-on session ourselves back at IDF (check the preview out here), we'd have been skeptical too, but now is the time to put all the hype to rest. For this review, we will pit the brand new Core 2 Extreme X6800, Core 2 Duo E6700 and Core 2 Duo E6600 against the current fastest dual-core desktop processors in the market, and that includes Intel's Presler core Pentium Extreme Edition 965 and the AMD Athlon 64 FX-62.

Despite the Extreme name tagged to the X6800, the three Core 2 processors are actually identical. All three run on a 1066MHz FSB and feature a 4MB L2 cache. The only real difference is the CPU multiplier and operating frequencies. If you're thinking that's not so extreme, we've had the same thoughts too, but that is for another article to discuss. Since all three X6800, E6700 and E6600 do not have any architectural differences, our benchmarks should be able to show you how the new Core microarchitecture performance scales with frequency and the competition.

The testbed specifications used for this review are listed below:-

Intel Core 2 Configuration

Intel Desktop Board D975XBX (Intel 975X Express chipset)

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800, Core 2 Duo E6700 and E6600

2 x 512MB Corsair XMS DDR2-800 non-ECC memory modules (CAS 4. 4-4-12)

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)

MSI GeForce 7900 GT 256MB - with NVIDIA Detonator XP 84.21

Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2

Intel Pentium XE Configuration

ASUS P5WD2-E Premium (Intel 975X Express chipset)

Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 965 (with Hyper-Threading)

2 x 512MB Kingston HyperX DDR2-667 non-ECC memory modules (CAS 4. 4-4-10)

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)

MSI GeForce 7900 GT 256MB - with NVIDIA Detonator XP 84.21

Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2

AMD Athlon 64 FX Configuration

ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (nForce 590 SLI chipset)

AMD Athlon 64 FX-62

2 x 512MB Corsair XMS DDR2-800 non-ECC memory modules (CAS 4, 4-4-12)

Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 80GB SATA hard disk drive (one single NTFS partition)

MSI GeForce 7900 GT 256MB - with NVIDIA Detonator XP 84.21

Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2

Benchmarks

The following benchmarks will be used:-

BAPCo SYSmark 2004

SPEC CPU2000 v1.3

Lightwave 3D 7.5

Futuremark PCMark 2005

SPECviewperf 8.01

Cinebench 2003

XMpeg 4.5 (DivX 5.0.3 encoding)

XMpeg 5.0.3 (DivX 6.2.5 encoding)

Futuremark 3DMark05

Futuremark 3DMark06

Unreal Tournament 2004

AquaMark3

Quake 4 ver.1.20

F.E.A.R.

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