Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 Preview – Conroe Performance

System Setup and Benchmarks Used

After some more poking and proding, I was able to produce an NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI Intel Edition reference motherboard to test the Conroe on — thus far all tests have been done on Intel chipset motherboards. 

With this board, I should be able to get some of the first public SLI performance numbers in a real world game scenario, just like we use in our video card and GPU reviews, to see if Conroe can offer real world benefits to gaming.

As I already mentioned, while I have the E6700 CPU in my hands that will be the top of the line Core 2 Duo processor released next month, the Core 2 Extreme Edition X6800 will run one multiplier faster at 2.93 GHz compared to the 2.67 GHz of the E6700.  While this ES processor would not allow me to move the multipliers UP to test at X6800 speeds, I could move the multipliers DOWN in order to test E6600, E6400 and E6300 CPU speeds set respectively at 2.40 GHz, 2.13 GHz and 1.86 GHz.  So while the CPU speeds are emulated, they should be relatively close to real world results we’ll see when the CPUs launch.   (Note: currently, the information I have seen says the E6400 and E6300 will only have 2MB of L2 cache, not the 4MB that the E6600 and E6700 have; this may affect performance results on those actual processors when they launch).   

Our memory in the test bed is the latest Corsair XMS2 memory supporting DDR2-800 speeds at CAS 3 latency; though we ran them at CAS 4 in this instance. 

For our benchmarks, we used our standard onslaught of CPU tests as well as some additional gaming tests to see how the Core 2 Duo CPU holds up to enthusiast gaming.

Benchmarks:

• SiSoft Sandra 2005.SR3
• Everest Ultimate Edition 2006
• World Bench 5
• Windows Media Encoder 9
• DivX 6.1
• LAME MT
• CineBench 9.5
• SPECviewperf 8.01
• WinRAR 3.51
• 3DMark06
• FEAR 1.03
• Call of Duty 2 1.01
• PCMark05
• Guild Wars