Core2Duo - How have you got it?

[Dr_Ub3r]

well if i didnt have an amd dual core chip and i was buiding from scratch i would by core2 (or crash 2 desk top ... i love that sharky lols)as the bang for buck is superb. but as my system should hold out for a year or 2 I will wait till then to see how things plan out. upgrading would cost me a fortune and only get me a few fps. I like to see a differnce when i upgrade

[excalibur2]

other than that it performs well but isnt as fast as i thought it would be. (excellent video encoding/gaming perf but std desktop use inst as fast as i thought)

Well a computer is only as fast as its weakest link......seems to me programs and hard drives have to catch up.

[hibby]

My Athlon 2500+ does everything I ask it to, so that'll last until at least the end of the year. Mostly I'm waiting to see what AMD can pull off, but I'll buy the best I can get for my money when I finally get around to upgrading.

[Kanoe]

Upgraded from a Athlon 2500XP-M to E6300 as wanted to move to new gfx card which was PEG so did the whole system.

I was suprised by how easy and by how much the E6300 overclocks being at the low end of the range but its holding nicely on 400*7 on stock voltages.

First Intel chip i have ever bought.

[the_icon]

Still have my athlon 64x3000 @ 300x9.

Does everything I want at the moment. Will probably upgrade later in the year - though not sure what yet.

[dave87]

Still running a Barton 3200+ in my desktop at home (still runs everything on medium settings) and have a Core Duo T2500 in my laptop (2ghz, 2gb Ram)

[Olly1234]

Upgraded from my old Abit NF2 and XP3200 with 1gb ram. Went for a good few years, but the SATA started to give out in the end months and was giving data errors. Had Been meaning to upgrade for a year or more, but thought as it being xmas would ask for some pressies, manged to get a Duo 6600 and a EVGA 680i, had already bought a Tagen 580W last year and a couple of WD RE edition drives, 320gb and a 160gb, and had another Seagate 120 kicking around, picked up 2gb Cosair 800 XMS C4 from scan and swapped my old gig of OCZ DDR for 2 6600gt's, is nice and fast now, though a new graphics card is on the horizon :-)

[Fillthee]

Upgraded from A64 4000/X1800XT setup to my current C2D/ATi Xfire running on an Asus P5W DH Deluxe, love it!

Shasta

[azrael]

Moved from AMD FX-60 to x6800. Wanted cooler running temperatures as standard plus the performance gain was a bonus. Did of course mean new mobo and RAM aswell tho. Great system would recommend

[sTrAnGeFrUiT!]

Watch this space....

[piranha]

Had an Opteron 146 system before my E6600. Really noticing the difference in all things.

Thought Opterons clocked well but the Conroes are in another league; have the E6600 2.4 sitting at 3.6ghz.

Only thing I will upgrade from this is to a quad core.

[krazy_olie]

Well I didn't really move on as I made this pc for uni and my home pc is still a p4.


I bought a 6300, it might have worked out a couple of quid cheaper to get an AMD system at the time but I figured that it wouldn't be particularly upgradeable cpu wise.

[bergy10]

3 months ago I had to switch from 3.4ghz to 2.8ghz after the 3.4ghz northwood died. Couldn't find another northwood, so went to ebay and got a slower cpu!
I didn't want to do a complete upgrade at the time, considering what was happening at the market place.

However, will upgrade to quad as soon as following conditions met: 1st refresh of QX6700 and 1st refresh of 8800 (depending on what ATI does).

[DanceswithUnix]

The thing is - you can buy the Intel chips now and have been able for a while I don't think they are going to give up the performance lead that easily.

AMD are in a painful situation with the price war they have unleashed which to be honest is doing nothing but hurt them

Performance lead per clock isn't that high, and should easily come back in the next generation. Remember that a lot of benchmarks and games are heavy users of SSE, and right now Intel have a 2x advantage in SSE retire rates per clock which can easily explain the up to 40% gap in benchmarks (more like 20% in many). That is being addressed by AMD.

The problem I see AMD having is hitting the 3.5GHz+ that people seem to be managing from the C2D machines, so whilst I expect machines will be delivered with the same performance I susupect overclockers will still want to go C2D.

Wasn't the price war started by Intel, who still have plenty of cash? AMD were never in a position to win, but have to respond to Intel's pricing.

[kalniel]

*nods* price war was entirely Intel.

AMD had the opportunity to with the X2 chips, but chose not to.

But I thought the performance lead per clock for Core 2 Duo was really quite high - a 1.86ghz c2d is about 2.6-2.8ghz AMD? Mostly that's down to the 4IPC of c2d vs 3IPC for AMD, and the fact that 32 bit instructions aren't all that big

There's a good article on xbit labs I think about the barcelona chip - it should cut back into the performance per clock lead, but it's not going to carve a huge advantage, and you're quite right - Intel can get up to high ghz easily - they're used to it after all. AMD have more problems there.

[R3MF]

needed a second PC (the way everyone *needs* a second PC) in Sept of 2006, looked at the price performance of AMD X2's as compared against the new Intel C2D's................. and the latter won by a mile!

so i got one.