Linux Hardware Looks at Core 2

Penguin Lover writes "Linux Hardware has just posted a new story on how Intel's new Conroe performs under Linux. From the article: 'Now is a great time to be CPU shopping because no matter which side of the isle you look on, you have great choice for both CPUs and motherboards. Along with Intel's chipset offerings, keep in mind that NVIDIA has the nForce series for Intel CPUs which would give you SLI support for all your Quake Wars and UT2007 gaming needs.'"

which side of the what?

[njvic]

Isle? Come on /. editors! It's aisle!

Re:Apart from gaming

[MightyYar]

Compiling anything, encoding video, ripping CDs to MP3, large relational database queries, scientific computing, etc.

Oh, you meant for reading email and surfing the net? Yes, your hardware is fine.

Re:Dontcha just love...

[Konster]

Yeah... 4 weeks ago the AMD 3700+ was $200.

Now it's $99.

NOW seems to be a pretty good time to pick up on decent processing power. NOW I can get a decent CPU for $99, a 320 GB drive for $95. ...and the list goes on. Silent 7600 GS for $110. Top name DVD recorders all day long for $28.

I just built that system for less than $600 and it uttlerly vaporizes the box I built last year at double the price.

But you are still on a 486 waiting for the right NOW time to upgrade.

Vorbis-players für alles.

[eddy]

Yeah definitely save the money on the iPods, the iAudios [cowonamerica.com] are much better anyway. I suggest the U3 if you want a good flash-based Vorbis-player.

Re:Bang for the buck

[subsolar2]

The Core2 E6600 seems to be a nice bang for the money as it is right around the middle of the currently available speed grades and is the cheapest iteration with 4MB of L2 cache. It also seems to be competitive with dual core AMD products (my usual choice) that are substantially more expensive. It's definitely a buyer's market these days...let the price war begin! :)

Actually if you include the motherboard price AMD X2 chips are more competetive since my looking around show Intel Core2 compatible MB costing $50-100 more than similar AMD socket AM2 boards with socket 939 being cheaper yet.

Re:which side of the what?

[matthew5]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sic [wikipedia.org]

Re:which side of the what?

[wirelessbuzzers]

It's Latin for "such" or "thus". If you quote something with an error or otherwise weird construction, you write "[sic]" to indicate that the quote appears that way in the text you're quoting.

Re:But what compiler flags to use?

[MarcQuadra]

I thought 'nocona' would get you all the instruction sets you wanted, but the execution core and scheduling of the Core 2 are much closer to the Pentium-M. You might be better off specifying 'Pentium-M' and using switches to enable SSE3. The Core and Core 2 are much closer to the i686 (P3) than they are to the NetBurst (P4) under the hood, even though the Core series can chew on a lot of the newer SIMD instructions and shares an FSB with some Pentium 4s.

Re:Apart from gaming

[LDoggg_]

To run a decent sized lcd at native resolution would be a start

A card two or three generations before that(tnt1 or tnt2) wouldn't have a problem running at a 1600x1200
His Gforce2 probably has 32 or 64 megs of ram, plenty for even a large LCD panel.
I'd probably be interested in upgrading that CPU before the video card, but likely have to do both as newer boards are using pcix over agp.

Re:But what compiler flags to use?

[Agelmar]

I downloaded the 32-bit precompiled version of firefox, and was able to install the flash plugin into that.

Actually, for me, 64-bit is entirely convenient. I just type "emerge mozilla" and it works ;-) Haven't tried VMWare though

But have you actually tried to buy one?

[JustNiz]

>>> 'Now is a great time to be CPU shopping... you have great choice for both CPUs and motherboards.... keep in mind that NVIDIA has the nForce series for Intel CPUs which would give you SLI support for all your Quake Wars and UT2007 gaming needs

Umm nope. Iv'e been trying to buy the bits to make a no-compromises gaming PC and can't get anywhere at all.
Products that have been actually reviewed, benchmarked and advertised for weeks but are still not available to actually buy include:
* a retail core2 X6800 CPU (I want the official fan too)
* any motherboard with Nvidia 590 sli intel ed. chipset
* the fastest memory (corsair 6400c3)
and finally not yet reviewed but:
* the new Nvidia GPU that will do directX 10 (for vista comaptability)
If you were to buy a non-directx 10 top-end GPU now you'd be crazy.

The worst offender is Intel. I don't know why even now about a month after the core2 launch you still can't find a retail x6800 extreme anywhere. I'm guessing intel are just letting the big builders like Dell grab the entire supply still. Intel shouldn't just feed those guys without putting some out on the street too.

Re:965 chipset

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

I have a gigabyte ds3 mobo with core 2 duo 6600, using kernel 2.6.17-gentoo-r4 and patch from http://lkml.org/lkml/diff/2006/7/11/493/1 [lkml.org] both the 4 x sata piix 2 x sata jmicron work fine, pata does not work at all, it is a known issue and should be fixed in 2.6.18, see lkml and mm trees for more info.

And a damn fine machine it is too.

AC

Re:Constant Battle

[tomstdenis]

Well clearly I can't comment about future plans from AMD. Just that the next revision beyond F will address some of the Core 2 specific optimizations.

But also keep in mind benchmarks can say anything. You think Core 2 is the better processor? Ok, drop 8 of them in a HPC system and run 50 independent tasks on them from researchers all over the world. You think your 4MB cache helps when you have so much pollution? There are applications where K8 is STILL the better choice by far.

Most benchmarks Intel picks are for very local applications on a single processor [die] setup... I wonder why...

Tom

Re:It would be even nicer

[FuturePastNow]

TPM is built into motherboards, not processors. And very few motherboards have it.

Re:965 chipset

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got an E6600 with the gigabyte 965P-DS3.

Using Fedora Core 5 (2.6.17-1.2157_FC5smp kernel)

the Gigabyte SATA ports work well, the Intel one's work but not well (about 10x slower using hdparm -T) and the Gigabyte PATA ports not at all.

A work around for the PATA port problem was to get PATA --> SATA adapters for the optical drives and plug them into the Intel SATA ports where the speed problem is less relevant.

Re:Bang for the buck

[Dwedit]

Hyperthreading is only found in the Pentium IV series of processors, the Architecture of core 2 duo can't support it.

Intel's ahead... until September

[smilindog2000]

AMD is apparently already making 65nm parts for Dell, supposedly available next month! See:

http://www.fabtech.org/content/view/1757/2/ [fabtech.org]

Re:Bang for the buck

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

I just searched for "core 2 compatible" boards on newegg and got 5 results ranging in price from $50.99-$119.99. So the motherboard premium that's being bandied about seems to be largely nonexistent. Also, an E6600 is likely faster than an X2 4800 for most (all?) tasks. In order to step up to similar performance you need the X2 5000 or one of the faster AMD FX processors.

If I was buying a system today, I'd probably lean towards the Core 2 Duo. A few weeks ago, I'd probably have gone with an Athlon64 X2. I'd have to agree with the OP and say that the competition has been great for the buyer.