July 14, 2006
Intel Core 2 Duo and Extreme Review
The real deal launch reviews of the much vaunted Conroe chips are now out and they don't fail to impress. Intel has taken the performance lead at a lower price point away from AMD. The biggest question is now availability in the channel for the gamers who have been watering their mouths for months.After years of wandering in the wilderness, Intel has recaptured the desktop CPU performance title in dramatic fashion. Both the Core 2 Extreme X6800 and the Core 2 Duo E6700 easily outperform the Athlon 64 FX-62 across a range of applications—and the E6600 is right in the hunt, as well. Not only that, but the Core 2 processors showed no real weaknesses in our performance tests. (I would say that Core looks like a more balanced architecture than Netburst, but at this stage of the game, Netburst just seems slow almost across the board.) No matter what you're hoping to do with your PC, a Core 2 processor should be a very solid choice.
