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

Conroe Flexes Core Microarchitecture

We mentioned in our last IDF Spring 2006 update that we'd have some exciting Core microarchitecture performance numbers for you and well, here it is. In a small closed room session, Intel ran a benchmarking session with a pre-production Conroe system. If you're still clueless, Conroe is the codename of Intel's next generation desktop dual core microprocessor, which is based on the new Core microarchitecture (read about it ). Conroe will be launched around the third quarter this year and will replace the current Presler-based Pentium Ds and Extreme Edition CPUs.

The interesting thing about this session was that Intel decided to do a little dual core challenge of their own. This time, Intel pitted AMD's current best, the Athlon 64 FX-60 against a "mainstream" Conroe PC. We're sure you remember AMD's challenge to Intel last year on the server platform with AMD unanimously announcing themselves the winner as Intel did not respond. Now we know why. Intel has been itching to be able to show off processors on their Core microarchitecture and once we saw it for ourselves, we truly think that by the second half of 2006, there will actually be a head-to-head CPU bout.

There wouldn't be any point going on and on about things, so we'll get right to the chase. In regular www.hardwarezone.com tradition, the test bed setup for both PCs are listed below:-

Intel

• Conroe @ 2.66GHz (4MB L2 cache)
• Intel Desktop Board D975XBX (Intel 975X Express)
• 2 x 512MB DDR2-667 @ 15-4-4 CAS 4.0
• 2 x ATI Radeon X1900XT 256MB in CrossFire Mode
• Catalyst 6.3 Beta (Driver String 8.23-060131a-030154E-ATI)
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (with DirectX 9.0c)

AMD

• Athlon 64 FX-60 @ 2.80GHz (2MB L2 cache)
• DFI LANPARTY UT RDX200 (ATI RD480)
• 2 x 512MB DDR-400 @ 5-2-2 CAS 2.0 CMD 1T
• 2 x ATI Radeon X1900XT 256MB in CrossFire Mode
• Catalyst 6.3 Beta (Driver String 8.23-060131a-030154E-ATI)
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2 (with DirectX 9.0c)

Additional Notes

Before we go into the benchmarks, there are a couple of differences and optimizations made to the test systems for your considerations. While Intel did not allow us to peek into the Device Manager, we were able to navigate around the rest of the system and while you maybe skeptical that this is an Intel setup benchmark, we could not find any undue faults with both test beds. We also did not have enough time due other schedules and as such, we did not manage to get into the BIOS nor were we able to run each benchmark in more than one setting.

• The Conroe platform was using DDR2-667 memory in this demo, but will take advantage of DDR2-800 officially on launch.
• The Conroe CPU has a 2 x 2MB L2 cache vs. the 2 x 1MB L2 of the Athlon 64 FX-60.
• In order to compensate on memory performance, the Conroe's DDR2 timings are 15-4-4-4 while the AMD's DDR memory are clocked very aggressively at 5-2-2-2 1T.
• The AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 has been overclocked to 2.8GHz (from 2.6GHz) in anticipation of AMD's next part.
• Intel used the older RD480 chipset so that the CrossFire setup would match. The newer ATI RD580 chipset (CrossFire Xpress 3200) supports dual PCIe x16 while Intel's 975X Express only supports dual PCIe x8 electrically.

In the following pages, you'll see performance numbers of live benchmark runs and not magical numbers Intel pulled out of a hat. Will Conroe be the end of AMD's performance desktop reign? You be the judge. Of course, we will reserve the final say on performance when we have these systems on hand ourselves, but these are as close to the real thing you'll get to see in a while.

Results - F.E.A.R.

First up F.E.A.R. the benchmark was run with the following settings at their defaults: Computer was set to "Maximum" to stress the CPU and physics engine. Graphics was set to "Medium", which defaults to a resolution of 800x600. This might have been a bit low, but we did not have time to rerun further benchmarks for other settings.

As the graph below depicts, the results really speak for themselves. What you should be looking at is the average framerate as that shows what kind of experience you'll be seeing with the Conroe most of the time. At 270 framers per second (fps), the Conroe system was nearly performing 50% faster then the AMD system and the Conroe machine never dropped below the 110fps throughout, while the FX-60 dipped to 70fps.

The maximum fps spike of the Conroe was slightly dubious though at 774fps, but then we rarely count high spikes since they usually only happen at rare occasions like when you're looking at a plain wall without anything behind.

Results - Quake 4

The Quake 4 version used was the 1.0.5.0 beta2 patch that enables dual core support. Benchmarks were run at 1024x768 at High Quality. All benchmarks were run twice in order to cache level data and scores were taken off the second run.

With the flag "r_useSMP" set to 1, Conroe scores were about 22% higher than the FX-60. With "r_useSMP=0" (single core performance), the Conroe PC managed to outperform the FX-60 by an even higher gap of around 27%.

Results - HL2 and UT2004

For Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, again we were running at 1024x768 with all details set to High in the Advanced tab. HDR and AA was not enabled however and standard Trilinear filtering was used. Again, HL2 benchmarks were run twice, the first time for caching and only the second round scores were recorded. What we noticed though was that the Conroe PC seemed to suffer from load issues, though we were told that this was due to the fact that Intel still hasn't optimized and worked out some of the storage driver bugs yet. However, even as the Conroe system loaded up the map a few second after the FX-60, it finished the benchmark way ahead. The Conroe machine only took 45 seconds to complete the benchmark run, while the FX-60 seemed to chug along to complete after 57 seconds. For those who are interested, Intel seemed to be using a custom demo file - pcba_lost_coast.dem.

Unreal Tournament 2004 may be a very old benchmark, but it still seemed to scale pretty well with new generation PCs. For UT2004, the Conroe machine had a 22% performance lead over the FX-60. Intel's demo file used was named bots.demo4.

Results - Media Encoding

Next up, we ran a suite of video and audio encoding tests using WME9, DivX 6.1 and iTunes to compress mp3s.

For Windows Media Encoder 9, we took a two-minute MPEG2 file and compressed it using a single pass CBR for both audio and video. Audio settings chosen was WMA 9.1 codec, 32kbps, 32KHz, Stereo. Video compression was under the WMV9 Advanced Profile, 240Kbps down to a 320x240 resolution video stream. The Conroe PC took about a minute and six seconds to complete the encode while the FX-60 came in around nine seconds later.

Our DivX encode test was run through XMPEG 5.0 with DivX's Insane Quality encode setting. Other settings were left at default. The Conroe machine completed the encode in two minutes and four seconds. This time, the FX-60 was almost half a minute slower than the Conroe.

Lastly, we had an mp3 compression test using iTunes for encoding. The Conroe machine finished faster than the FX-60 by 15 seconds.

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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