MaximumPC 2006 10

The Results

T

o test the two CPUs, we used two different but similar

platforms. For the Athlon 64, we used an Asus M2N32-

SLI motherboard with the nForce 590 SLI chipset, a Western

Digital WD4000KD SATA hard drive, 2GB of Corsair DDR2/

EPP RAM, and a single GeForce 7900 GTX card. For the Core 2

Extreme, we used an engineering sample motherboard based

on the nVidia nForce 590 SLI Intel Edition chipset, and the exact

same Western Digital WD4000KD drive, RAM, and videocard as

the AMD platform. We loaded both systems with a fresh install of

Windows XP Service Pack 2 and used identical graphics drivers

on both platforms. In gaming tests, we ran the benches at very

low resolutions to take the graphics card out of the performance

equation. For our other tests, we selected applications limited

mostly by the CPU performance. In our Adobe Premiere Pro 2.

test, for example, we take high-defi nition video, then we edit it,

apply a ton of transitions, and encode it to WMV. It’s all about the

CPU with these tests.

And the Winner Is...

BENCHMARKS

18 MAXIMUMPC october 2005

head 2 head TWO TECHNOLOGIES ENTER, ONE TECHNOLOGY LEAVES

C

PU shootouts in the last few years have been tricky to

judge. While one CPU will often take the overall series of

tests, there’s usually a program or two that favors one microar-

chitecture over the other. For example, in the synthetic PC Mark

2005 (which we do not use), the dual-core Pentium Extreme

Editions usually fare better despite the preponderance of real-

world tests that favor the Athlon 64. But here, it’s a clean sweep

of the benchmarks, with the Core 2 Extreme X6800 taking

every CPU-intensive benchmark by a huge margin. The small-

est gap we saw was in 3DMark06, which is a GPU test even at

low resolutions. For the most part, we saw the Core 2 Extreme

X6800 best the Athlon 64 FX-62 by about 30 percent—although

in Bibble Pro we saw an incredible 70 percent difference. These

dramatic performance deltas translate into less time spent wait-

ing on your PC. In the modern processor wars, a performance

gap this large is unheard of. Clearly, the Core 2 Extreme X6800 is

the superior chip. We don’t know how long Intel’s lead will last,

but the king has defi nitely returned.

2.93GHZ INTEL CORE 2.8GHZ AMD ATHLON PERFORMANCE

2 EXTREME X6800 64 FX-62 DIFFERENCE

3DMark2001 SE overall 47,160 35,723 32%

3DMark06 overall 6,386 6,138 4%

FEAR at low resolution (fps) 321 213 34%

Quake III at low resolution (fps) 876 578 34%

Premiere Pro 2.0 HDV MPC test (sec) 1,920 2,676 39%

Photoshop CS2 MPC Action Script (sec) 207 278 34%

Bibble Pro 4.7 RAW Conversion (sec) 454 773 70%

Best scores are bolded.

Quake III at low resolution (fps) 876 578 34%

Photoshop CS2 MPC Action Script (sec) 207 278 34%