Conroe - the new King?

Yesterday, I was invited to the Intel Channel Conference held at The Legend at Fort Canning Park, as one of the small-time speakers.

The most interesting thing at that event, was that Intel commissioned Terence from VR-Zone to build 2 systems based on the $1600 AMD FX62 and the top end Intel Core2Duo (at around the same price). No other constraints, according to Terence. He tried his best for both, and the sysconfig only differed from the motherboard chipset and CPU. The AMD system used a nForce5 chipset and the Intel system used a 975 chipset, all other things equal. No overclocking was allowed, everything ran at stock speed. Various benchmarks were prepared, but 2 were used - MPEG encoding and a Half Life Timedemo.

In both the tests, the Conroe system beat the FX62 by a margin of about 40%.

Seems now that it is indisputable that the Conroe is king for now. Until next year, that is.