Installation, Testing and Comparison

The installation of the actual CPU was fairly easy, just pop it into place and lock the retaining lever down. Now installing the CPU cooler was a different story, the Intel CPU Cooler is very hard to install, maybe it was the board I used, but it seemed like I had to apply an undue amount of force to get the legs to lock into the motherboard to secure the cooler. I actually heard the motherboard creaking under the pressure of the force I had to apply. It was kind of scary actually, but I got it installed.

For testing purposes I will be using various benchmarking programs like SiSoft Sandra 2007, 3dMark, Super Pi and TMPGEnc. All tests were done 10 times and averaged out, yes this has been a long review….

My AMD system is an Athlon X2 4200+ (at 2389 MHz) liquid cooled with a Corsair Nautilus 500, 2 Gigs of Corsair XMSPRO 3500LL 2-3-2-6, installed in a DFI SLI-DR LanParty motherboard. I’m not going to be going into benching the video card much, but it is an XFX 7800GTX. This review will be focusing on the CPU’s performance in various benchmarks and tests. You might think the Intel CPU would win, especially running DDR2 and running quite a bit faster, but let’s find out….

The Intel system is the Cedar Mill 631 (3.0 GHz), which is liquid cooled also with a Thermaltake Rhythm external cooling system with Super Talent PC8500 / 1066MHz, 1GB Kit (2x 512MB), 5-5-5-15 latency.

Now that that is out of the way, let’s have some fun…

Also, I overclocked the Intel to 4 GHz and threw those marks in for comparison as well to really see what happens. I was also able to get the Cedar Mill 631 up to 4.8 GHz stable, I did get to see 5 GHz but it was only for a few seconds before it blue screened, the idle temp was 62C. Here is the link for the CPU-Z validation: http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc?id=96070 of the 4.8 GHz mark.

I am currently adding a custom water cooling kit that should have a lot better performance than the Rhythm, it will feature 2 dual 120mm rads, a Danger Den Maze 4 water block (modified bracket to fit the LGA775) and I think I will be using my DDC 12v Laing pump, but that pump doesn’t like to start all the time so we will see. Stay tuned for those over clocking results soon.

First let me say that some of you may consider this to be a bit skewed because the X2 is a true dual core CPU, but Intel has the Hyper-Threading that simulates dual cores supposedly. Like I mentioned I really wanted to see how a 1+ year old CPU compared to a faster newer Intel. So take the results with a grain of salt.