Intel is very excited about its new Core architecture, especially with Conroe on the desktop. It's not really news to anyone that Intel hasn't had the desktop performance crown for years now; its Pentium 4 and Pentium D processors run hotter and offer competitive or lower performance than their AMD competitors. With Conroe, Intel hopes to change all of that.

From top to bottom - Quad-core 65nm Kentsfield, dual core 65nm Conroe and 65nm Pentium D

Intel setup two identical systems: in one corner, an Athlon 64 FX-60 overclocked to 2.8GHz running on a DFI RD480 motherboard. And in the other corner, a Conroe running at 2.66GHz (1067MHz FSB) on an Intel 975X motherboard.

The AMD system used 1GB of DDR400 running at 2-2-2/1T timings, while the Intel system used 1GB of DDR2-667 running at 4-4-4. Both systems had a pair of Radeon X1900 XTs running in CrossFire and as far as we could tell, the drivers and the rest of the system setup was identical. They had a handful of benchmarks preloaded that we ran ourselves, the results of those benchmarks are on the following pages. Tomorrow we'll be able to go into great depth on the architecture of Conroe, but for now enjoy the benchmarks.

As far as we could tell, there was nothing fishy going on with the benchmarks or the install. Both systems were clean and used the latest versions of all of the drivers (the ATI graphics driver was modified to recognize the Conroe CPU but that driver was loaded on both AMD and Intel systems).

Intel told us to expect an average performance advantage of around 20% across all benchmarks, some will obviously be higher and some will be lower. Honestly it doesn't make sense for Intel to rig anything here since we'll be able to test it ourselves in a handful of months. We won't say it's impossible as anything can happen, but we couldn't find anything suspicious about the setups.

Gaming Performance

The one area where AMD has been the clear leader for years has been in gaming performance - Conroe changes everything.

Updated: In Don MacDonald's keynote he also provided us with another reference point for Conroe's performance, this time under Call of Duty 2. We have no idea what settings they ran at but the results we saw were Conroe at 111 fps and a Pentium Extreme Edition 3.73GHz scoring 90 fps. But the most interesting gaming tests are below:

First off we've got Quake 4 running the 1.0.5.0 patch at 1280 x 1024 with High Quality settings. The only demo available was Intel's own demo but nothing looked out of the ordinary with the recording. We tested with both r_useSMP enabled and disabled, first the SMP disabled numbers. Updated: The Quake 4 scores have been updated as mentioned in our follow-up article.

With SMP disabled, Conroe holds a 25% performance advantage over the 2.8GHz Athlon 64 X2. Enabling SMP provides a similar 24% performance advantage.

Next up is a Half Life 2 Lost Coast demo, once more an Intel supplied demo but there's only so much you can do to a demo recording to make it favor one CPU maker over another:

Conroe's performance advantage extends to 31% under Half Life 2, talk about a complete role reversal here.

We finish off this page with Unreal Tournament 2004 and a 20% performance advantage for Conroe.

F.E.A.R. Performance

F.E.A.R. gets its own page for a couple of reasons:

1) It's the only gaming benchmark that we're using that doesn't use an Intel provided demo. This is the same demo we use in our tests.

2) The integrated test tool reports Min, Avg and Max results, and three graphs take up more room than one.

We ran with all of the effects settings at Maximum and the graphics settings at Highest defaults. Updated: As we've described in our follow-up article, there was an issue with the original F.E.A.R. results that has since been fixed. The charts below have been updated.

First up - the average frame rate:

If you had any doubts about the results on the previous page, this one should convince you. Even when running a non-Intel created demo, Conroe offers a 20% performance advantage over the 2.8GHz Athlon 64 X2.

The advantage exists in both the minimum and maximum frame rates as well:

Media Encoding Performance

Intel also had a DivX 6.1 and an iTunes 6.0.1.3 test loaded on the machine for our use. The scores speak for themselves, Conroe showed just under a 30% performance advantage in DivX encoding and 11% in MP3 encoding. Updated: Windows Media Encoder 9 with Advanced Profile, the same test that we use in our CPU reviews, is showing Conroe with a 12% advantage over the 2.8GHz AMD system.

Final Words

While we're still comparing to Socket-939 and only using RD480, it does seem very unlikely that AMD would be able to make up this much of a deficit with Socket-AM2 and RD580. With Conroe's performance advantage averaging over 20% it looks like Intel's confidence has been well placed.

Also keep in mind that we are over six months away from the actual launch of Conroe, performance can go up from where it is today. We also only looked at the 2.66GHz part, the Extreme Edition version of Conroe will most likely be clocked around 3.0GHz which will extend the performance advantage even further.

AMD still does have some time to surprise us with AM2, but from what we've seen today, they are going to have to do a lot of work to close this gap. We saw performance today in the two areas that we were most concerned about with Conroe: gaming and media encoding, and in both Intel greatly exceeded our expectations. Also remember that Conroe should be lower power than the AMD offering we compared it to, although we weren't able to measure power consumption at the wall in our brief time with the systems.

Going into IDF we expected to see a good showing from Conroe, but leaving IDF, well, now we just can't wait to have it.

More from the show as we get it...