I'm in total agreement with everything you've said. I'm thinking this is perhaps why we're not seeing Intel release 3.6 Ghz cores. Maybe the cpu clock doubling the fsb clock is the "sweet" spot that keeps work per cycle efficiency high and power consumption low. Perhaps running the cpu at nearly 3 times the fsb speed introduces some wait states to RAM that do not exist in running the clock a 2x the FSB.
I don't know much of either benchmark, but I'd suspect the Valve test is much more sensitive to memory latency than the rendering which seems to care more about memory bandwidth available to the cores and the core clockspeed.

First post...not sure how the chart will look.
New Original Change %
E6750 Clockspeed 3.64Ghz 2.66Ghz 0.98 37% Increase
Rendering 1157 875 282 32% Increase
Valve particle 53 48 5 10% Increase
New Original Change %
X2 4400 Clockspeed 2.6Ghz 2.3Ghz 0.3 13% Increase
Rendering 795 708 87 12% Increase
Valve particle 28.7 24.3 4.4 18% Increase
This may be just me thinking outloud but I'm not seeing a lot of bang out of the extra Ghz. I mean the E6750 gets 37% increase in clock and gets 32% increase (descent) in Rendering, but only 10% increase (blows) on Valve test. The X2 65nm series get 12% (Rendering)/18% (Valve) out of a 13% increase in clock. That seems to me to be outstanding. The 2.6Ghz results are taken from the X2 5000+ in place of an actual overclock, but the two are brisbane cores if I'm not mistaken. It seem the Intel chips are not scaling with clock as well as the AMD chips.

Monitor

overclock looks nice. hope the price isnt any higher..
Supreme Commander is not a very useful benchmark.

It's nice they are putting out new stuff, but from a company stand point they should just milk what they have. No point if AMD can't do anything to push you. "Make that money".

It really is amazing how the A64 X2's huge lead in memory bandwidth doesn't seem to matter one little bit on the benchmarks. Historically, the worry was always that processor speed increases would quickly outpace memory bandwidth. Yet that doesn't appear to have happened at all -- if anything, the opposite appears to be the case -- we have more memory bandwidth than we can use.

Tests should have been rerun (at least some of them) with the other chips on the Asus board. All the tests were largely invalidated in my eyes by using different platforms when you could have used the same one. You've ended up testing not the CPU, but the CPU/chipset combinations. The P35 was known to have better performance than the previous chipsets already, and the 975X is pretty much 2 generations behind it. There's no telling whether the performance differences (when there were any) were due to the bus speed or the chipset.

I know it saved a lot of time to just reuse old review numbers, but that can sometimes make for a less than complete review, lacking important information.

In particular the power consumption comparisons could be vastly improved, since there's such a difference between the power consumption of the chipsets. At the very least, running one new test with the E6700 on the Asus board would have been nice, so that you could directly compare whether the E6750 had any differences in power usage. You might have even run the E6700 with the higher bus but same clock speed, or as close as it would go, to show whether the difference in bus speed makes a difference compared to just the revision of the cores.

The bits where the E6750 actually had lower performance than the E6700 are also glossed over a bit. No explanation is attempted. Why would graphics performance be particularly lower on the Asus board with the higher FSB, to the point that it affects scores? This is another point where using the same mainboard for comparison would have made a big difference.

Still an interesting article, since it shows that when it's introduced the lowered prices on the 1066 bus chips will make them a good value without sacrificing much performance.

At this speed, the E6750 is the fastest dual-core processor we've ever seen.

Aren't the various FX-7x processors (that show faster results than the E6750) all dual-processor chips? What am I missing?!!

heh, those memory latencies are all that still score for AMD. But whats interesting is the gaming FPS. Its virtually a tie. looks like the GPU is doing its job.

I believe all the 1333FSB chips are the new 'G0' stepping which reduces TDP, at least on quad cores. The guys at xtremesystems.org have gotten very good results from early samples as well at lower volts than older C2Ds. It's nice to see Intel is still making improvements in the 65nm process which has been in use for quite a while.

Now Damage, please do some oc'ing with a hefty aftermarket aircooler! :) (You didn't specify what you used on the overclocking page for the better cooling.)

Beware that the 1333Mhz C2Ds have TXT a.k.a "Trustless Computing".

I always figured that 1333Mhz C2Ds were a marginable upgrade at best. It certainly took Intel a while to get them onto the market.

I guess we will have to wait for Penyrn.

GeForce 7900 GTX? Are we sure we aren't Vertex Shader or ROP limited here? Remember, fillrate scales much easier then geometry, new cards score higher in old and current games if there are many pixel shaders. Therefore NVIDIA and ATI have skimped on that part, until Microsoft said unify

Heres a benchmark of Dark Messiah rediculing the 7900 GTX and X1950 XTX
http://jooh.no/root/omg_3dcards/G80/Vertex_Shader_processing_limit.png

ban axe...baby !! :D

Hmmm. Given the stellar overclocking of the first wave of C2Ds, is anyone in this crowd really going to upgrade say, a P965 board for one of these? I have an E6400 running at an easy 3.2Ghz on a 1600Mhz FSB and until I can get something that really blows this thing out of the water, I don't see myself upgrading anytime soon. That said, if you're coming from eg any kind of P4 or an older single core Athlon64 this is a really nice leap in performance.

It's also fairly apparent that Intel is "coasting" as someone else said - from the O/C results it's obvious these latest C2Ds have plenty of headroom and that Intel could be releasing faster speed grades if they were feeling the pressure from AMD. Since striking the "killer blow" last summer it's as if Intel are just sitting back with their arms folded saying "come and have a go if you think you're hard enough". Intel released their best microarchitecture in ages when they were getting their backsides kicked (performance-wise) by AMD and I just don't see where the next lot of impetus for performance improvement is going to come from :-(

So in one way, Intel is raising prices for the same multiplier? Not trying to hate (good article, btw) just want to throw this out and get your feedback:

See I couldn't help noticing something. I've been planning my C2D build with an E6420 on that P5K deluxe.

That's an 8x multiplier, if taken to the 333FSB, resulting in the same 2.66Ghz rating as this E6750. I'm wondering how large that rumored July 22 price cut will be.

Granted, maybe the E6750 has better OC headroom than the 6420. I wouldn't doubt if a die srhink improves stability, but in a year's time when the the old C2Ds are off the market and you want to buy something in the old E6400's price bracket, you'll end up getting a 6x multiplier instead of the the 8x .

I guess I'm also saying it wouldnt surprise me if Intel were making a little bit more dough by taking the 6400 binned silicon with more headroom and turning them into 6750 price-ranged chips.

Nice review.
Price will have a lot to do with who purchases this.
If the Intel and AMD Quad core parts start dropping below the $300 mark, some of us might forsake the speed for more cores.

Thanks for the time though.

EDIT: D'oh wrong article!

Great article.

However, it's reviews like this that remove any reason for me to upgrade my two-year old X2 +3800 system; it just doesn't seem to make much difference in my daily applications and gaming--not nearly as much as when I dropped an 8800GTX in the system.

So... essetially... yawwwwn

Nothing beats reading reviews past midnight. I'll go get a life now.

Intel is just coasting these days. In my opinion it's good to see. Much easier to make good decisions as a company when you're moving comfortably.

Damn your conclusion. It took literally everything I had to say out of my mouth.

Good review as always. It will be interesting to see if any gains are posted by 1333MHz quad-cores. They may get much closer to a linear increase in performance.

Noticed a minor mistake on one of the benchmark graphs for Supreme Commander Simulation. The E6750 scored an 8887 while the QX6700 scored 8879, but the E6750 is in fourth place, and the QX6700 is in third.

Great article, as always.

I'd like to see a couple of older CPUs in benchmarks. I'm always curious to see hoe processors a few generations old compare to newer procs, and how they do on the newest benchmarks.