20050513

Chip Wars- Part Dual


Serious computer enthusiasts are waiting for the new dual core processors due out this fall to build their new rigs. From these preliminary results, make mine AMD. Be sure to check out all the details in the review.
What we're looking at here is a clean sweep. We can find a couple of edge cases – mostly synthetic benchmarks—where Intel's dual-core desktops outpace AMD's new Athlon 64 X2. We're more concerned with real applications, and when it comes to those, we have a hard time finding any situation where a dual-core Pentium comes out ahead of a dual-core Athlon 64. Even in most single-threaded apps, AMD takes the cake. Games are an absolute blow-out, with the Athlon 64 X2 handily outstripping even a liquid-cooled Extreme Edition dual-core Pentium overclocked by 25%. And it's not just games: The X2 beat the massively overclocked Pentium in DivX encoding and LightWave rendering, and basically tied it on the 3ds max SPEC APC test.

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