Overclock3D.Net :: Print Page :: Intel Core 2 Duo 'Conroe' E6700 & X6800 Benchmarks

First impressions of this board are good. The colour scheme is simplistic which is a nice change from the garish colours some boards sport. In addition to this, the ATX, EPS12v & PCI-E connectors are in good positions at the top of the board.

From the images above we can see that the D975XBX has 5 phase power, which is pretty average for the latest generation of LGA775 boards. The caps are only slightly higher than the CPU socket which shouldn't cause any issues for most cooling solutions.

A welcome and rather 'snazzy' addition to the board is 5 blue aluminium heatsinks responsible for cooling the mosfets. It is worth noting that these are actually soldered to the motherboard and would prove quite difficult to remove. Users planning on water-cooling should also be aware that the popular Swiftech Apogee block will not fit this board without modification. At this point I am unsure if the Swiftech Storm block (which a shares similar layout to the Apogee) will fit.

Both the NorthBridge and SouthBridge on the D975XBX are passively cooled by aluminium heatsinks, which is great news for those of us looking to get away from noisy NorthBridge fans. Under most circumstances the passive heatsinks provide ample cooling, however when overclocking or increasing the voltage on the NorthBridge the 975X chipset can produce a fair bit of heat. This would be better dissipated by the use of a single 40mm fan placed over the top of the NorthBridge heatsink, and may even help further overclocking potential.

The D975XBX has a total of 8 SATA connectors onboard. In the left image we can see the 4 SATA ports provided by Intel's ICH7R SouthBridge controller. These ports are capable of SATAII (3.0Gb/s) speeds along with RAID 0, 1, 5 & 10.

The 4x blue SATA connectors pictured on the right are provided by Silicon Image's Sil 3114 controller and are only capable of first generation SATA (1.5Gb/s) speeds along with RAID 0, 1 & 0+1.

The board's memory slots follow the colour scheme of the rest of the board and also assist in showing you which slots need to be populated to obtain dual channel mode. The D975XBX can take a total of 8gb of 240-pin DDR2 memory rated at speeds of up to DDR2-667. Obviously higher specification memory such as DDR2-1000 can also be used, but will only be necessary if you plan on overclocking.

Interestingly the board comes complete with 3 PCI-E (x16) slots. At present it is unclear exactly what the 3rd slot could be used for as no graphics card are capable of working as a 'threesome' at present. Many people have suggested that the slot could be used for a dedicated physics processor, but at this point in time the slot is essentially useless.

Intel have decided to include a certain degree of legacy connectors on the back of the D975XBX. We can see from above that the user is provided with both Serial & Parallel ports along with the usual PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports.

Also included are 4x USB 2.0 ports, 1x IEE1394 port, 1x Gigabit Network port and Intel's own High Definition sound card with coaxial and digital outputs.

The BIOS is somewhat bare in comparison to other overclocking orientated boards, with most overclocking options (including Vcore and Multipliers) being hidden from the user unless an Extreme Edition CPU is used. Thankfully there is a small jumper on the board that can be shorted using a conductive pen which allows full access to all of the overclocking options for any CPU.

Listed below are the available voltage selection options present in the BIOS:

DDR2 Voltage: 1.8v - 2.2v
Vcore Voltage: 1.275v - 1.600v
MCH Voltage: 1.525v - 1.725v
FSB Voltage: 1.271v - 1.395v

For processors running on lower vcore (such as the Conroe), most of these options should be sufficient. The only area that really lets the board down is the DDR2 voltage selection, which only goes up to 2.2v. This is the default voltage for some DDR2 modules and means that overclocking of some memory modules may not be possible.

The pictures above show our E6700 and X6800 Conroe chips. On the surface both of these processors look exactly the same right down to the number of caps on the underside of the processor. Lets have a look at their specs...

	E6700	X6800
Core Speed	2.66ghz	2.93ghz
FSB Speed	1066mhz	1066mhz
Multiplier	x10	x11
L2 Cache	4mb	4mb
EMT64	*	*
Execute Disable Bit	*	*

The only visible difference between these two processors is the multiplier, so why the massive price difference of over £400 and the use of 'Extreme' in the chips name? Well to cut a long story short the X6800 has a totally unlocked multiplier (both up and down). This means that higher overclocks are easily achievable without the need for a motherboard capable of high FSB's and without needing to upgrade your memory or run it on a divider.

Enough of the talking. Lets run some bencharks!

With in excess of 20 seconds difference between the Pentium4 630 and the E6700 the Core 2 Duo's are clear winners in the SuperPI 1m benchmarks. Up until recently, most overclockers could only dream of a sub 20 second 1M SuperPI bench but the Conroe achieves this at stock settings with ease.

Performing a full 32m SuperPI took the Pentium4 630 a total of 37 minutes 15 seconds to complete. This result was yet again completely overshadowed by the Core 2 Duo's, finishing the test almost a full 20 minutes earlier!

This shows the efficiency of the C2D architecture. Getting rid of the long pipelines in Intel's Netburst architecture has really helped the Core 2 Duo, with the SuperPI benchmark really showing how fast the C2D's are.

Sisoft Sandra

Sisoft Sandra is a synthetic benchmark utility capable of reporting and benchmarking a wide range of system components.

In the Processor Arithmetic and Multimedia benchmarks we can see that the Conroe's enhanced feature set and Dual Core technology clearly has a major advantage in Sisoft Sandra, produces scores 2-3 times higher than the Pentium4.

The memory based benchmarks show us the major advantage of having a processor with Intel's Smart Memory Access incorporated. Reducing the memory latency by 26ns and increasing the bandwidth by around 500-600 mb/s, the Conroe shows a significant advantage over its predecessor. This is an area where previous Intel chips where falling far behind AMD, however with the change to the core architecture, Intel have managed to play catch up.

As you can see the Core chips really shine here. With the rest of the system remaining the same and just the processor changing, the difference in score is greatly noticeable. In benchmark terms upgrading from Pentium 4 to Core2Duo is akin to upgrading your graphics card to a higher model. Where the P4 was very much lacking in gaming performance, the Core chips really make this up. Once again the shorter pipeline and more efficient memory access on the Core processors really helps give them a "kick" in gaming performance.

3DMark06

As with 3DMark05, 3DMark06 is a good reference examination for a gaming PC. With a couple of very tough CPU benchmarks and graphics tests heavily relying on DirectX 9.0x features, this really is a test for your gaming system. Remember that the lower resolution tests give the CPU more of a workout as the GPU gets loaded less.

Here, again, Core shines through. The P4 just cannot keep up in gaming and benchmark tests with Conroe. The past has seen AMD as being "King of the Hill" where gaming is concerned, but as we have seen in various articles around the web, Core outperforms even AMD's flagship processor. Here we really can see the architecture change benefits - in a word: impressive.

Counter-Strike Source

Counter Strike Source is a popular online FPS (first person shooter) coded by Valve. The graphics detail levels are very scalable and can be adjusted to suit both high and low end systems. We'll be running the following benchmarks with graphics settings all set to their highest, and at resolutions of 1280x1024 and 1024x768.

At both low and high settings the two Conroe chips share almost identical results. This is most likely down to the graphics card being the bottleneck in the system. With a more powerful card (7950GTX or X1900XTX) I'm confident that we would see these results much higher.

The P4 630 showed that gaming wasn't its strong point and ended up lagging (no pun intended) behind the other chips by between 40-140fps which goes to show just how much performance can be gained by a processor upgrade.

The Core chips also produced a much smoother gaming experience. There were no visible dips in FPS where there were with the P4. This made for a generally more enjoyable experience. Certainly our own gaming performance improved when using the Core chips.

Very little difference was observed in the hard disk burst speed, which was to be expected as all tests were performed with the same hard disk and controller.

A small difference can be seen in the CPU utilisation during the tests, with the Core 2 Duo's performing 1-2% better than the Pentium4.

Cinebench 9.5

Cinebench is a benchmarking tool based on the powerful 3D software Cinema 4D. Consequently, the results of tests conducted using cinebench carry significant weight when analyzing a computer’s performance in everyday use.

Looking at the CPU benchmark above, we can see that only a minimal performance increase was observed when Cinebench made use of HyperThreading on the Pentium4. However, when Cinebench made use of both cores present on the Conroe processors, the results more than doubled, leaving the Pentium4 for dust!

The OpenGL graphics benchmarks were more closely matched, with the Pentium4 scoring around 600 points lower in all tests.