Intel's Core Duo is worth serious consideration if you care about performance, low noise and high efficiency in a PC system. We compared it to efficiency specialists Pentium M and Turion 64, but found the Athlon 64 X2 to be a potential show-stopper.

It's sad to see that despite the fact that the Core Duo stomped all over the AMD lineup in the benches, the Core Duo still earns that conclusion Core Duo Loses The Platform Game.

What exactly do you mean here? I'm not trying to troll or anything, I know you intended to say something else here. I genuinely want to know what was meant to be said or what the statement intended to say.

Damn - this is my dream ...
I would like to thank Tom's Hardware who kindly listened to its readers and finnaly had this test.
Yet while reading this artice a few questions hit me:

1- As mentioned in the article, GPUs are becoming also problematic, both noisy and major power consumers, would it be possible as well to have an efficiency test for GC as well?
2- what are the technical problems if a mobile graphic card is used instead of a regular one, and are they more efficient also under STRESS?

and I had a wild thought:
would it be COST efficient (just as it is energy and noise efficient) to base a desktop (or HTPC) comuter on a mobile MOBO ? or in other words, just buy the parts for a notebook and building it in a "regular" case instead of a notebook shell ...! (I think this is possible!)

thank you

What exactly do you mean here? I'm not trying to troll or anything, I know you intended to say something else here. I genuinely want to know what was meant to be said or what the statement intended to say.

Actually, the T2600 goes to-to-toe with the X2 in terms of performance, and whomps it in efficiency, at less of a cost. I'm not sure where THG is getting thier info nowadays, but I doubt they're paying much for it.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2006 [...] dex.x?pg=5

They're talking about performance/power/$ in uber-level.

Whizzard9992,
The statement Core Duo Loses The Platform Game is accurate as far as meaning that there are not motherboards currenly available to take full advantage of the powersaving aspects of the Core Duo design. I do not take the statement to mean that the Core Duo loses in the benchmarks shown in this article. It might have been better put to say that the Core Duo is so new that the motherboard manufacturers have not yet produced products for the CPU.

Looking at the benchmarks the Core Duo is at the top of many and close to the top in the rest of the performance benchmarks. In the Power consumption tests the Core Duo uses from 70W to 93W. The Pentium M 780 is the only one of the 4 CPUs tested with a descrete graphics card that uses less wattage (59W to 83W). The Athlon X2 3800+ uses 74W to 133W; and the Turion uses 79W to 101W.

Assuming that the motherboards will appear in the future which take advantage of the design features of the Core Duo (and appropriate BIOS), the performance of this CPU should improve.

By the way, why is this thread under Memory rather than CPU?

Anyone notice the screenshots of CPU-Z on pages 15 and 17? Athlon X2 4600+? RAM at 240?

That doesn't necessarily mean that the RAM is set at 240MHz base clocks. That just means that HT is set at 240 with a multiplyer of 10x that sets the CPU to 2.4GHZ. The Memory is on it's own bus. You can set that independent of HT. That one on page 17 does show that though.... hmm.

to hide the thread from the likes of MMM and conroe, and all the other flamers and fanboys in the CPU forum

I didn't see a single benchmark where the 2.16GHz Duo lost to the 2.26GHz Centrino.

Is THG aware that a great many folk jump straight to the conclusion of these?
What a poor choice for of words for the conclusion title?

Look at the benchmarks in which the Duo beat out the Centrino:
Open GL ... Duo won
Quake ... Duo won
3DMark2005 ... Duo won
Pinnacle Studio Plus ... Duo won
Divx transcoding ... Duo won
Xvid transcoding ... Duo won
Main Concept MPEG encoder ... Duo won
Ogg Vorbis ... Duo
WinRAR ... Duo
3D Studio Max .. Duo wtfpwn'd em all
SiSoft 2005 Synthetic ... Duo
SiSoft 2005 ... Duo
PCMark05 ... Duo by much
PCMark05 CPU ... Duo by much
PCMark05 Memory ... Duo

Now lets look at the benchmarks in which the Centrino beat out the Duo:

NONE!

They tied in the Lame MP3 encoder bench for which THG used a beta version of to test (this software is just in its Dual Core optimization infancy).

Furthermore, the energy consumption charts are bogus ... on page 1 of the review:
"The Core Duo uses the same processor socket as the Pentium M, but requires some electrical modifications, which means that you cannot use existing Socket 479 motherboards. Suitable products are not yet available, but several motherboard makers are working on them. We had a look at one of the first solutions back in March, AOpen's i975Xa-YDG 975X chipset is not known to be energy efficient."

So they grabbed some AOpen POS thats KNOWN to be an energy hawg to show meaningful results? Ummm no ...

I believe I've read elsewhere that the 7900GT (from what I've heard, comparable to the 7800GT) produces much less in the way of excess heat. So maybe nVidia is taking a step in the right direction (the shrink down to 65 (?) nm helps, of course)

Absolutely right conclusion - all three mobile variants are great CPUs, we just don't have a price-viable platform for any just yet... at the moment low-power, yet reasonably priced computing seems rooted in socket 754 with the pre-Turion CPUs. Not an ideal solution by any means, if you're looking for performance.

Don't get me wrong: I understand and agree. Not a criticism of the article, just raising a point. It's a shame such a good processor has to be shunned by lack of platform support. I wonder if the i945 overstock has motherboard makers wary, especially in light of Conroe's pending release.

I don't agree that the X2 clearly crushes the Core Duo, though It does outperform it in some areas, but the Duo takes the crown in others. It gives me hope that the conroe will be a true contender, and not just an over-hyped marketing scheme.

This is, of course, based on limited information. It would be nice if THG did thier own Core Duo versus X2 platform duel My money is on the X2, but I still think it would be an interesting read.

Mr Schmid and Mr. Ross,

Sorry, if it is already discussed. This is not a flame thing, but just an observation on the way THG conclude thing.

I do have problem with the statement "Core Duo Loses The Platform Game" as the conclusion. As I count thru the tests, (for comparison purpose, I ignore the onboard graphics components), here what I found:

Given a tie if less than 2% difference in result:

Core Duo: 9 wins of which 3 can be considered tie. (also win in 4 Power consumption test)

X2 3800 : 4 wins

Turion: 1 win (consider tie)

PM: 6 wins

If we exclude the PM, then Core Duo's record is 13 wins.

The statement should have said: "Core Duo wins big in benching but having no solid platform" or taken a page from THG's own style "Core Duo assaults hard .... but having no solid platform". Simply put "Core Duo Lose the Platform Game" is too simplified to the point of misleading for noobies like me, who just may jump to the conclusion and pay no attention to benching. THG may inadvertenly appear bias ... though I don't really think so.

Respectfully,

Chime

Yes it is, in the Mac Mini. Since you wanted a system under 45W, there is no need for those PCI slots. You can buy the Core Solo version and swap in a high-end Core Duo, and boot Windows already.

Would like to point out a couple of things I find strange in the test since I'm running a similiar setup with a K8NGM-V and a 25W Mobile Sempron.

- There IS a bios option to turn off the integrated graphics on the K8NGM-V.

- Turion MT's runs on 0.8Vcore-1.2Vcore stock while the K8NGM-V only supports 1V-1.3V so it's running on a lil more juice than it should. I think readers should know that.

- Since this is a low power test, why is the test done with 2 HDD's? And a Raptor at that. It sorta skews the results.

Wow. That's a really good point. I didn't notice that.

Idle power consumption for the raptor is 8 watts. The samsung spinpont would be the appropriate drive here: I doubt anyone is going to want to RAID a low-power computer. Do the idle stats include the drives in an ACPI "Shutdown" state?

The Mac Mini is also a good example of a 45W Core Duo platform. The Mac Mini's DO run Windows legitimately. This would have been a good addition to the article... They have DVI and modest gfx capabillities.