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Oh Intel, how far we have come from those processors affectionately known as Preshots. For those of you that have been living under an enormous rock, Intel and AMD have revamped their public relations pitch and changed focus from GHz to performance per watt. What this translates into is low watt processors with immense computing power. Conroe, which is part of the new Core Microarchitecture, is the one of two new chips being released by Intel that follows this focus down to each transistor. At Spring IDF, Intel showed some preliminary benchmarks of this new lower power chip completely dominating the competitions top processor in every benchmark in their extensive suite. These benchmarks caused an uproar and got everyone ready for some real benchmarks done by individuals, not a website reporter. Well, there have been a ton of delays, but finally there are some preliminary benchmarks available, there isn’t much, but it shows what Conroe will do to the computing world.

Got PI?

In case you didn’t know, Super PI is the program of choice for benchmarking processors and showing overclock stability. In short, Super PI 1M calculates the number PI down to 1 million places, and reports back the time it took to get there. While these numbers are technically a synthetic benchmark, meaning they are something like a 3D benchmark in Quake 4 or Doom 3, these are the best results that you can get for testing a computers sheer ability to compute. I would like to give a big congrats to VictorWang over at XS.org for posting these results days before Fugger or FreeCableGuy could post their overclocked results. I apologize for the terrible pictures, click them to see the full-sized images.

As you can see, Conroe at 2.4 GHz completed Super PI 1M in a speedy 21.454 seconds. As a reference, it took AMD’s FX-60 23.54 seconds while running at 3.7 GHz under Dry Ice. While I am not trying to detract from AMD, in this case Intel has won fair and square. There are no tricks, there is no voodoo, this is simply a great product and it happens to have Intel stamped into its heatsink. It looks like we have a new performance champion, between Merom and Conroe, Intel has retaken the performance throne, at least until AM2 has a chance to fight back.

The Specifics

These benchmarks were ran on the 965G chipset with 2×256 sticks of DDR2 533 @ 4-4-4-12 timings. The system wasn’t very stable and the operating system was having troubles with the Task Manager, between it showing CPU at 25% load all the time and System Idle at 99%. Super PI 32M results haven’t been posted due to system stability issues but the bios update is being worked on to try and post some 32M results. Conroe refuses to boot on the Asus P5WD2-P which includes the 955x chipset, we are still waiting on results for the Intel BadAxe and Asus P5WD2-E motherboards, which will most likely come from Fugger or FreeCableGuy. With the 965G board, the board won’t post with a PCIE video card (7800GTX specificially) or with any larger sticks of ram. More results will be around in ~12 hours.

The Future

While these are still preliminary results running on an unstable machine with a twitchy bios, they still show how much power Intel has packed into this chip. For the general computer user, you will probably notice your programs will be a bit snappier, Windows and Linux will perform tasks quicker, and in general there will be a decent speed increase. However, for the overclocker, Conroe looks to utterly destroy all previous world records, and with the entry level Conroe coming in around 300$, everyone and his brother will be able to get one and make a name for himself. While I don’t believe heat will be the issue any more, the new issue will be how high your FSB is willing to go. With the Conroe that was displayed in these benchmarks, we are talking a FSB of 377MHz, 1511MHz effective. To put this in perspective, the highest Pentium 4’s operated with a FSB of 266Mhz, 1066 effective. While not impossible, it will be quite a challenge for motherboard makers and enthusiasts. It looks like we are in for an exciting ride through the summer as engineering sample chips start popping up and motherboard issues are resolved. If you get an ES Conroe, feel free to mail it to me for a “review”. More results to come when I receive them.

XtremeSystems.org thread
Victor�s Blog, Victor is the guy that is presenting all these benchmarks.

Update

Victor promised and Victor delivered! Initially Victor was having troubles with his video card, the 7800GTX he had lined up to benchmark with refused to work with his motherboard and the motherboard refused to operate with anything more than 512mb of ram. After all these troubles, the memory issue hasn�t been resolved, but the video card has seen an upgrade to a 6600LE. I think the pictures are proof enough that this processor, so here are the results. Just a comparison for the 3dmark05 score, with the onboard video the cpu test score was a mere 3008 points, however with the 6600LE it bumped up to a whopping 8279 points, now just wait for results with a 7800GTX or better.

3dmark03

3dmark05

3dmark06

PCMark05

Dual Pi 1M

Pi 1M

Pi 4M

Pi 8M

Pi 32M

Cinebench95

ScienceMark2.0

Sandra Arithmetic Benchmark

Sandra Cache and Memory Benchmark

Sandra Multimedia Benchmark

Sandra Bandwidth Benchmark

Besides the Sandra Memory Benchmark, Conroe comes out on top in everything, and in some cases it is just amazing how fast this chip is running. The Bandwidth test is so low because the memory is running at DDR2-533 with timings of 4-4-4-12. That is about it as of right now, still silence coming from Fugger and FreeCableGuy, even I am getting a bit impatient, but there is nothing we can do except wait for them to work out their problems. I will continue to update this post as results keep coming in, so check back sometime tomorrow. Once again, I’d like to congratulate Victor on his achievement, to be the first is amazing.