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  • leexgx - Thursday, April 19, 2007 - link

    ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe

    are you useing the older corsair XMS2 sticks 1.2v as i cant get my 2.1v sticks to even POST some times in my pc

    allso this test is 2 months old other review good thing is your useing an 8800GTX to test the limits of the CPU, other web site was still useing and ATI X1950 and fiding that thay was GPU limted (dono why thay still bother testing them with that x1950 as the test will be GPU limted not CPU)
  • photoguy99 - Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - link

    I've been critical of AMD's chances, but they do have a shot - The problem is their chance to catch up depends on Intel slipping up.

    AMD needs a perfect storm to happen:
    1) Barcelona needs re-capture performance/watt leadership
    2) Barcelona neees to re-capture performance/watt be damned leadership
    3) Barcelone needs to ship in big quantity during calendar Q3 07
    4) Intel needs to slip Penryn ramp up to Q2 08 and slip their next micro-architecture to 09

    If any one of these doesn't happen it's going to be rough going.
  • yyrkoon - Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - link

    Well, the big question, WHY Vista 64 bit ? The other question WHY AMD 6000 + ?

    For me, personally, testing on Vista 64bit, is a bit odd, and perhaps is used to confuse the real subject: Why pay a $200+ premium for a CPU (direct comparrison to the E6600), that only does better in video related applications ? Oh, and in case anyone is interrested, I am NOT a fan boy, but if I were to pick a preffered platform, it would be AMD / nVidia. Currently I'm using an AM2 system, with the best budget motherboard on the market period(this is my opinion of course: the ABIT NF-M2 nView).

    Also. personally, I would have rather seen the data done in XP, because this would give us a real idea of how this CPU would compare to previous tests, and again, in my opinion, was very bad timing on anandtech's behalf if this was not intentional. I've done my own testing in Vista as well, so I KNOW pretty much where the performance differences lie, although I have not personally tested Ultimate 64bit. I, not unlike many others, will not see the need for Vista for at least a while longer, and Directx 10 games become mainstream . . . XP Pro performance data PLEASE!

    The main reason that I havent moved to C2D, or intel as of yet, is simply, because of the motherboards availible for this platform, and I simply do NOT like what the Intel side of the camp is offering, period. Motherboard features / cost, is nearly the only thing keeping me from switching sides ATM, and I for the life of me, can not figure out how AMD gets off charging a $200 price premium for a CPU that isnt very good overall. Now, if some manufactuer, made a motherboard that was both attractive in features, and cost, I personaly think AMD would be in serious trouble, which would be very bad for everyone, not just AMD.

    Based on these 'scores' you've given, I would think the CPU to buy from AMD would be the 5600+, and perhaps that what your conclusion said ? I wouldnt know, I make my own 'assumptions', based on the test data (IE, I didnt read the conclusion) ;)
  • DigitalFreak - Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - link

    Thanks for the good laugh!
  • yyrkoon - Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - link

    You show me, a good C2D capable motherboard, for $80 usd, that is as feature rich as the AM2 ABIT NF-M2 nView, and perhaps I'll laugh with you. Until then, your comment isnt / wasnt even nessisary.
  • strikeback03 - Thursday, February 22, 2007 - link

    That $200 price premium on the AMD processor you mention plus your $80 motherboard budget will get you almost any board in the C2D camp.
  • yyrkoon - Thursday, February 22, 2007 - link

    Except, that you completely missed the whole point. $80 budget board, does NOT mean, someone is going to go out and purchase a sub $500 CPU for it, thats just silly. However, I also wouldnt stop them from upgrading to that CPU, when the prices drop over time. Also, not everyone wants SLI, or crossfire GPUs, so by the time, you find a board with as good features, be it i680, or one of the Intel chipsets, you gain, SLI, dual GbE, and a very good chance of other goodies, but you lose, integrated graphics, which if you're building a very low budget PC, this can save you a good amount of cash. Also, this motherboard will accept just about any aftermarket CPU cooler you could care to put on it, but honestly, IMO, this isnt a board I'd use to OC anyhow, but it will OC well compared to the cost you put into it.

    There are lots of motherboards out there, that have some very cool features, personally, I really, really like the Workstation line from Asus, 2x 16x PCIE, 2x 133 PCI-X, and 2x PCI 2.3, and I beleive they make them for either AM2, or C2D, but the plain simple fact of the matter is, they also cost more than $300, thats nearly as much as an E6600 . . .

    Take a look at the $80, and under Intel CPU capable motherboards, and tell me you can find one that is as stable, with as many features as this one. Then realize just how many of those, actually supports C2D . . . Trust me, I've looked, because I really want to move away from AMD atm, but it does not make sense, if you have to compromise, on what you get stablity/support/feature wise.
  • defter - Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - link

    New A64 6000+ actually performs slightly worse (loses more benchmarks) than E6600. However, A64 6000+ costs $459 while E6600 costs only $316. Worse performance for 45% higher price??? Is that a good deal? Reasonable price for A64 6000+ would be about $300.
  • sprockkets - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    That $102 dollar 3600 chip and a new AMD HDMI chipset or the Abit 6150 board. For more performance, sure, C2D, but hey, can't beat $102 for good dual core performance.

    I wonder how Fusion will push prices lower...
  • anandtech02148 - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    At idle and load do these charst include 8800gtx power consumption too?
    Is this the whole system powerconsumption including the graphic card?
    I thought 8800gtx power consumption alone is 245wtts.

  • defter - Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - link

    The maximum measured 8800GTX power consumption is about 150W. NVidia has mentioned that absolute maximum is 180W. However, since this is a CPU review, it's logical to assume that they stressed only the CPU in "full load" power consumption test.
  • poohbear - Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - link

    wow so 260w load plus 50w for a 8800gtx, thats only 310wts! kinda strange when companies are selling 1kilowatt psus.:/
  • poohbear - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    i was gonna ask the exact same question. I wish they'd clarify that in the articles when they talk about power consumption. Is that 263wts under load for the 5600+ JUST for the cpu or the whole system? thanks for any of the writers who can clarify this 100%.
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    Power reports are always for the entire system. Obviously, lower end GPUs would reduce total power requirements quite a bit, but in maximum load testing the stress is only on the CPU and not the GPU. Thus, the ~50W power difference is going to remain whether you're running an 8800 GTX or an X1300 SE. The latter would simply use probably 40-50W less total power.
  • bamacre - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    Add in OC'ing and Intel, still, jumps further in the lead.
  • BladeVenom - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    But most people don't overclock.
  • ViRGE - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    Many of the readers of this site do though. The C2D is so mind numbingly easy to overclock, it's hard to not do it.
  • Roy2001 - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    I agree. I never OCed before. But with E6400 it is so easy. I just changed FSB from 266 to 350, I have a 2.8Ghz C2D. No voltage change, no cooling change. That's easy.
  • mino - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    Not to mention 800FSB E4300 parts.
    2.66/333FSB is pretty much a safe bet on most boards.
    Even 2.13 for $150 is nice with board at STOCK FSB!.
    Who needs E6400 then :) (for stock performance).
  • poohbear - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    well if a 2.4ghz C2D can beat a AMD64 @ 3.0ghz, then calling a C2D @ 3.2ghz (the average overclock from what im reading) the "king" processor is a monumental understatement. It'd rape the 6000+.
  • hubajube - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    quote:

    I just changed FSB from 266 to 350, I have a 2.8Ghz C2D.
    Wow, no shit? That IS easy.
  • Rolphus - Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - link

    You think that's easy...

    I've got 2.4GHz E6600 on an nForce 680i-based Asus P5N32ESLIWTF board (I forgot the model nubmer, can you tell?).

    Last night as I was disabling the onboard audio, in the BIOS, I was curious so I went to the "extreme tweaker" menu, hit "AI Overclock", selected "20% overclock", and there you go - a 2.88GHz E6600.

    The machine's fast enough to run everything I want at stock speeds, but who's going to complain about spending 15 seconds to bump the clock speed by 20%?
  • customcoms - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    I would like to point out that overclocking S939 and AM2 chips is equally easy-and probably why C2D overclocking has proven easy for many people-they started on the AMD chips when they were king and very overclockable (50-60% is not uncommon on the low end AMD chips).
    For example, my main rig is still an Opteron 165 (basically an X2 3800+ with twice the cache) clocked at 2.7ghz, no voltage change, stock cooling, raised FSB speed from 200 to 300mhz. Required MAYBE 5 bios boots total, all of which were concerned with ram stability (switched ram to 2x1gb at same time installed processor), which can be a pita with a DFI Ultra-D.

    The difference between AMD and Intel when it comes to overclocking: highest possible speeds. C2D has A LOT of headroom, which means E6300 AND E6400's can usually reach >3ghz, topping out around 3.5ghz; E6600's can be pushed to 3.7ghz. X2 3800's commonly top out at 2.6gh. Stellar chips can be pushed to 3ghz (actually, good Opty's normally reach 2.8-3ghz, very few X2 3800's get there). No AMD cpu I've seen online has been pushed to 3.2ghz or greater on air. This means C2D is king for now, when we are talking about overclocking.
  • Neosis - Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - link

    You are right about Conroe but actually single core AMD CPUs reached 3200 Mhz with air cooling. And some Opty 165-170-175s managed to exceed 3Ghz Barrier with low voltages. Here is an old thread about San Diego:

    http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...">http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...
  • neogodless - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    The whole time I was seeing how the X2 6000+ stacked up against the E6600, which would be the CPU I bought if I go with Intel. And suddenly I get to Power Consumption and it's mysteriously absent. I suppose I can try to extrapolate based on the other chips, but if you have data for it and accidentally omitted it, can you please add it in, for the sake of my laziness? Thanks!
  • Imnotrichey - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link


    i found it interesting the 6700 consumes less power than its younger brothers. But wow, this article made a 6600 really look awesome

  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    Not sure why E6600 is missing on the power charts (perhaps Anand was running a downclocked E6700 for performance testing, which wouldn't be valid in power numbers), but it's pretty safe to say the E6600 would be right around the power draw of the other C2D chips - between the E6700 and E6400. Voltage settings also vary on the C2D CPUs IIRC, so you can get some CPUs that run at 1.1V and others that run at 1.3V, even though they're the same model number.
  • jelifah - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    Is the author making a hint of 'things to come' when Barcelona arrives?

    A thinly veiled hint that AMD could actually compete? One can only hope. As was said repeatedly in the article, competition is the reason we have these prices and these processors. Without competition I doubt we would be seeing the performance, let alone the price, that we see today
  • hubajube - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    The X2 5600 does actually compete well with the E6600 and they're very close in price. Although, OCing is another story.
  • goinginstyle - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    I was expecting to see another "just like me" article on this CPU and was surprised to see benchmarks under Vista and 64bit at that. Thanks for an interesting read and hopefully the motherboard editors will start using Vista in their articles now.

    I still think AMD is close enough in performance that it does not matter that much which platform you use. After all of the troubles I had with my 965 board I wonder why I switched now. Was there any reason why you did not use the nvidia 680i board for testing since the 590 board was used for the AMD system?
  • Roy2001 - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    Trouble with 965P? That's rare case. 1st time to me actually. My DS3+E6600 system has yet to give me trouble. My old Athlon systems, both desktop and laptop, do not work very well with USB/PCI wifi card. Laptop need to boot/wake without wifi card inserted and desktop will lost connection once every day.

    I am not an fanboy, I am just stating the fact. As you can see, I have more AMD systems than Intel system.
  • johnsonx - Wednesday, February 21, 2007 - link

    Your wifi card problems were far more likely due to the drivers, and possibly the cards themselves, than due to the AMD platform. I've seen both of those problems on all manner of systems, both AMD and Intel. Besides, it just isn't the type of problem I would hang on the platform.
  • JarredWalton - Tuesday, February 20, 2007 - link

    P965 at launch was really quite flaky. Many people (me among them) had memory compatibility problems, and not just with elite memory. The BIOS updates have now pretty much fixed any problems, but some of those updates took 2-3 months after launch to fix all of the important stuff (depending on motherboard). And let's not even get into the "DirectX 9" G965 fiasco... I think we're still waiting on drivers that are even remotely able to run DX9 content, and it's still slow at that.
  • Thatguy97 - Thursday, June 18, 2015 - link

    man i bought myself a couple x2s after the price cuts back then still used a core 2 duo e6600 as a primary but they were so cheap i couldnt help myself had to get a 5600+

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