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Sneak Peek - Conroe Puts the Fear into Athlon 64 FX-60

By Zachary Chan - 10 Mar 2006

Results - PCMark05 and Final Say

Results - PCMark05 and Final Say

Although we were strapped for time, we managed to kick off PCMark05 while Intel was busy preparing to pack up, though we only managed to do a CPU run. The numbers speak for themselves. The Conroe PC came in at an impressive 6727 CPU 'Marks', outperforming the FX-60 slightly shy of 20%.

From all the benchmarks ran today, the Conroe test bed managed to best the overclocked FX-60 from anywhere between 20% to an extreme of 50% in the case of the average F.E.A.R. score. Yes, there are differences between the two machines that cannot be denied and we know that the RD480/RS450 solution is not the best platform to run an AMD system. But we are also experience enough to be aware that using a top-notch Socket-939 platform isn't going to improve the scores for the AMD processor by much at all.

On the other hand, one needs to also take a look at where Conroe is at the moment. Our benchmark session used a pre-production Conroe 2.66GHz processor with industry standard DDR2-667 memory. This will actually be a classic 'mainstream' configuration for Conroe. When Conroe is launched, it will be supporting DDR2-800 memory and we have not seen Intel's Extreme Edition version of Conroe yet (which is rumored to be closer to 3GHz at least).

Now when you start looking forward into the future when AMD shows their AM2 socket with DDR2 memory support, we recommend you to bring the popcorn. From what we're seeing right now though, Intel is set to wrestle its long-standing competitor and perhaps even dominate the second half of 2006. The tables have sure turned and things are looking to be very interesting. Now if we only knew how much the Conroe is going to retail for, but that information isn't going to be made known anytime soon since it will not make it to the stores till a good many months down the road. So don't put off your upgrade plans unless you can wait that long. But if you can, it might just be worth it; time will tell.

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