MaximumPC 2007 04

ATI CROSSFIRE XPRESS 3200 VS. NVIDIA NFORCE 590 SLI

U

nlike GPU-makers, who duke it out tooth and

nail, motherboard-chipset vendors tend to be

more cordial with each other. Not! Case in point,

ATI’s early south bridge sucked so badly that

most board vendors subbed a ULi-provided part

for it. Nvidia then bought ULi, and board vendors

were faced with a mysterious parts shortage for

their ATI boards while consumers barked about

lack of driver support. Like we said, it gets ugly.

Fortunately, newer CrossFire Xpress 3200 boards

use ATI’s SB600 south bridge; however, we still

saw problems in a showdown between an nForce

590 SLI board and a CrossFire Xpress 3200.

Using the same 2.8GHz Athlon 64 FX-62,

RAM, hard drive, GPU, drivers, and RAM timings,

the nForce 590 SLI generally landed ahead of the

CrossFire Xpress 3200 board in the benchmarks.

The new SB600 south bridge also delivered worse

hard drive performance than the 590 SLI. Of course,

whether Nvidia will continue to deliver chipsets

for AMD processors is a big question mark. Both

Nvidia and AMD claim that rock ’n’ roll will never

die, but like Van Halen without David Lee Roth, we

think Nvidia and AMD are heading for their own VH

Behind the Music special. Despite the drama, for

now the winner is the nForce 590 SLI, but we’d be

lying if we didn’t say we’re not sure where Nvidia

will be building AMD hardware next year.

T

o measure our budget

procs, we put the Core

2 Duo E6300 ($185, http://www.

intel.com ) into an EVGA

680i board and slapped

our Athlon 64 X2 4200+ EE

($175, http://www.amd.com ) into

an Asus 590 SLI mother-

board. Both boards were equipped with GeForce 7900 GTX cards, a single

74GB WD Raptor drive, 2GB of Corsair Dominator DDR2/800 RAM, and clean

OS installs. To keep things fair, we manually set the memory timings on both

systems and double-checked the clock speeds of the GPUs.

The winner? Intel’s 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo E6300 led the way in a major-

ity of our tests—including Adobe’s Premiere Pro 2.0 HDV video editing test

and the Photoshop CS2 image editing benchmark. The Core 2 also pulls

away fast in FEAR and Valve’s gaming particle test. But the 2.2GHz X2 bests

the Core in ScienceMark 2.0 and Cinebench by a bit. The upshot? We give

the Core 2 the edge in most media-handling chores and games that aren’t

GPU-bound, but the X2 beats the Core 2 in some fl oating-point and scientifi c

applications. Considering the Athlon’s almost 400MHz clock advantage,

we’re calling this one for the E6300 for its overall speediness.

2 MAXIMUMPC APRIL 2007

INTEL CORE 2 EXTREME QX6700 VS. INTEL

CORE 2 EXTREME X

QUAD CORE VS. DUAL CORE FASTEST CPU UNDER $

INTEL CORE 2 DUO E6300 VS. AMD ATHLON

64 X2 4200+ ENERGY EFFICIENT

BEST AM2 CHIPSET

Y

ou have $1,000 burning

a hole in your pocket,

and you don’t know what

to buy: Intel’s dual-core

2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme

X6800 or its quad-core

2.66GHz Core 2 Extreme

QX6700. To test the two, we

installed the procs in motherboards using the 975X chipset. Both mobos had

the same hardware and software installed. We selected applications that

would spawn enough threads to keep the dual core and quad core busy.

The result? In applications that support enough threads to keep all

four cores busy, the quad core spanks the dual-core processor. That’s

because the quad core is actually two of the dual-core CPUs connected

under one heat spreader. Even though the dual core is about 267MHz fast-

er, that clock speed can’t make up for the two additional cores in the quad

core. However, in apps that don’t spawn enough threads, the extra two

cores in the quad core sit idly and the dual core pulls ahead. So what’s

right for you? It depends on how far into the future you can see.

In the majority of today’s applications, the dual core will be faster.

But as more and more applications are updated to take advantage of mul-

tithreading, the quad core will pull ahead. We can recognize that quad core

and beyond is the future of computing. To not spend your $1,000 on the

quad core today—even with its clock-speed penalty—would be a mistake.

BENCHMARKS

2.66GHZ CORE 2 2.93GHZ CORE 2

EXTREME QX6700 EXTREME X

PREMIERE PRO ADVANCE PROFILE (SEC) 1,088 1,

BIBBLE LABS RAW CONVERSION W/ NOISE NINJA (SEC) 1,450 1,

3DMARK06 CPU 3,897 2,

QUAKE 4 (FPS) 173.3 195.

FEAR (FPS) 258 268

Best scores are bolded.

➭➭

BENCHMARKS

CORE 2 ATHLON 64 WINNER IS

DUO E6300 X2 4200+ EE FASTER BY X

3DMARK06 CPU 1,671 1,654 1%

VALVE PARTICLE TEST 34 22 54.5%

FEAR (FPS) 175 143 22.4%

QUAKE 4 (FPS) 127.2 123 3.4%

PREMIERE PRO 2.0 HDV (SEC) 2,800 3,305 18%

PHOTOSHOP CS2 (SEC) 284 332 16.9%

CINEBENCH 9.5 580 618 6.6%

NERO AVC ENCODE (SEC) 51.33 50.14 2.4%

Best scores are bolded.

BENCHMARKS

CROSSFIRE NFORCE

XPRESS 3200 590 SLI

QUAKE III NORMAL (FPS) 533 581

SISOFT SANDRA 2007 8,556 7,

3DMARK05 11,018 11,

PCMARK05 6,770 6,

PCM CPU 5,716 5,

Best scores are bolded.