Installation, Testing and Comparison Continued
Now we have Sandra 2007 Memory Bandwidth
Benchmark the memory bandwidth of your computer. Shows how your memory sub-systems compare. The benchmark is based on the well-known STREAM memory benchmark. (Higher is better)
Again a surprise here at how close the scores are, especially considering this is basically putting DDR against DDR2 memory…
Here we have the results for Sandra 2007 Memory Latency
Benchmark the latency (response time) of processors’ caches and memory. Shows how your processors’ caches and memory sub-systems compare. The latency of caches is measured in processor clocks (i.e. how many clocks it takes for the data to be ready) as it is dependent on the processor clock speed.
The latency of memory is measured in nanoseconds as it is typically independent on processor clock speed(lower is better)
The DDR2 runs at a higher latency than the DDR, but still wins clearly…
Now we have Sandra 2007 Power Management Efficiency
Benchmark the power management efficiency of the processors. Shows how efficient the power management of your processors is. The ability of the processors to step-down in frequency and voltage at different workloads is measured. The more a processor steps down in both frequency and voltage the better the score at the specific workload. The test stops when the workload is too great the processor even at 100% efficiency.
The ALU/FPU score is a geometric mean based on the whole range of workloads; thus the power of the
processor does matter in obtaining a higher score.
The Power Efficiency score is a geometric mean based on the supported workloads only. Thus the power of the processors does not matter. (Higher is better)
For both processors I have the Cool and Quiet and/or Speed Stepping turned off.
For some reason each time I ran this test I got an N/A result for the Power Efficiency of the Intel CPU, but the Dhrystone does show the 650i with the E6420 pulling slightly ahead…
Next up would be the 3DMark scores for 3DMark05 and 3DMark06, with SLI enabled and without. I ran them three times each and averaged them out. Higher scores are better…
Oddly in 3dMark05 the non-SLI of the EVGA/AMD setup beats the non-SLI ECS/Intel setup, and the rest are fairly close except for the SLI enabled 3DMark05 scores, you can see the ECS 650i based setup pulls very much ahead.
Next up I have Far Cry, same SLI enabled and not setup:
Clearly the Intel based setup is the winner with quite a bit more FPS difference especially when SLI is enabled.
I’ll be honest with you though, despite all these benchmarks and scores basically declaring the ECS/Intel setup the clear winner, the ‘feel’ is not there. The ECS/Intel setup just feels slower than my older AMD/EVGA setup, and by this I can’t seem to do as much at the same time as I could with my AMD setup. On my AMD setup I could run one instance of Prime95 on each core and still do other things, but when I try it with the C2D I can’t even browse the internet. Benchmarks are one thing, and all well and good the new C2d can beat my old AMD in those tests, but it just feels slower to me. It’s as if the Intel CPU can’t multi-task as well as the AMD CPU can, that’s the only way I can tell you how it feels.
I didn’t come across a couple problems, one I already mentioned about the low voltage settings for the ram, at this date there should be a new BIOS on the ECS site to fix that problem.
The next problem was with the Intel E6420 and this board, ECS did release a BIOS at the same time as the release of the CPU which supposedly added support for it, yes it works, works well? Not really, and by that I mean the temperature reporting is just not that good. At first I was getting reading 7-10 degrees under ambient, and this was with the Intel Stock Cooler installed, then another BIOS update and another seemed to fix the problem.
The ECS BIOS only gives a CPU temperature as a single temp, it does not show individual core temps.
Not a big deal really about the single temperature, but still when I try and use a software monitoring program I can’t get the temps to read correctly. This is most likely because of the E6420 itself, and the authors of the software not supporting it yet, like CoreTemp, SpeedFan etc, but I would expect the Nvidia Monitor to pick it up correctly, but it doesn’t not either. Also the Nvidia monitor does not show other important information either such as the voltages, why? Can’t really say….
I’m going to have my review of the Intel C2D E6420 soon, with a bit more testing included, I’ll have more of my conclusions then about the C2D. And also be on the look out for my review of the Crucial Ballistix Tracer this week as well…
On the overclocking side of things, sadly my C2D couldn’t even reach 2.2Ghz, from the stock 2.13Ghz.. Others have had great success with oc’ing their C2D, but apparently I’m not one of them, this was even tried on water, and with more voltage added to the core. It got to Windows and then blue screened on me….