Dual-Core Chip Ends Pentium's Reign

[Onkel Neal]

http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/2006...8435510220.htm

Intel on Thursday unveiled a lineup of new computer processors named Core 2 Duo, which is replacing its 12-year-old Pentium brand.


The company said that the new chips are about 40 percent more powerful and energy-saving than Pentium chips. Also known by the project name Conroe, the Core 2 Duo chips have two processing cores in a single unit, and are more efficient at running resource-demanding tasks like high-definition computer games.

Intel hopes that the launching of the new brand will help the firm regain its lost share in the central processing unit (CPU) market. The U.S. chip giant saw a 13-percent decrease in sales and a 60-percent drop in operating profit in the second quarter, compared to same period last year, as its archrival AMD prevailed in the low-end chip market for desktop and laptop PCs.

Core 2 Duo?? Their marketing guys must be asleep, that's not nearly as good a name as Pentium. You know it's a bad sign when they tout a CPU's power after riding up on Harleys

[Skybird]

I am not willing to go beyond max 600W power consummation for the complete system... which already is 180W more than what I have now... The article says the new toy is power-efficient, let's see how that will be after that new CPU has seen several evolution phases... There is a reason why 1.3 kW PSU are laready on offer. Ridiculous, if you ask me...

Instead of maximizing performance with dual, triple and quattro solutions for graphics boards and CPU , I would like to see them concentrating on reducing heat and power consummation,, both of which have been a real problem for me recently. After having given back my Radeon 850, and changing it for a TI6800 due to techncial problems with the Radeon drivers, it took me just two weaks to burn that board - without overclocking, with open tower and a ventilator nearby, a good stream of air and and despite a room temperatur between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius a CPU temp of 37 in idle and 52-55 at max. I'm back on my old and highly reliable FX5900XT. It runs all I have, except Oblivion (that one only at 640 or 800 and low details )

The major complaint I have about Vista so far is that MS says to run it in standard graphcial presentation you need one of todays highend graphics cards. I beg you - a TI7800 just for running an OS...? Is the OS meant to operate a hardware, or is the hardware meant to run an OS...??? not to mention that without doubt the many problems with new Vista will be on at least the same scale as was the case with XP in the beginning. So - no Vista and no new supersystem for me in the forseeable future - I'll ride my current horse until it falls dead. Don't need all these gimmicks.

[kiwi_2005]

Always been a AMD fan. This new Pentium chip sounds a winer tho. One thing about the Pentium cpu is they're easy to clip onto the motherboard compared to the AMD. I once put a hole right through a mobo while trying to clip on an AMD chip! I slipped while pushing the clip down and my screwdriver went right through the board!

AMD AthlonXP

[scandium]

Originally Posted by Skybird

I am not willing to go beyond max 600W power consummation for the complete system... which already is 180W more than what I have now... The article says the new toy is power-efficient, let's see how that will be after that new CPU has seen several evolution phases... There is a reason why 1.3 kW PSU are laready on offer. Ridiculous, if you ask me...

Agreed. Any upgrades I make, other maybe to a faster but modest single core amd cpu or a 2nd hard drive, will mean a new PSU as well (to replace my 6 month old 350W that works perfectly - for what it powers now) and probably a high efficiency 500W, minimum, with lots of amps on the 12V line for these power crazy video cards and cpus of today.

[SUBMAN1]

Skybird - 600 Watts? I'm already there! I've given up on Watts and I am now counting in volts / rails. Where most systems only have 1x 12 volt rail, I now have 4! I just sold my old silent $110 400 watt PSU because it can't even start my video card, let alone my system!

kiwi - You'd laugh at my heat sink! Massive is an understatement. Largest all copper sink I can find.

http://www.thermalright.com/a_page/m...duct_xp90C.htm

-S

[jumpy]

Subman1, what symptoms did you get with having an underpowered PSU trying to run your gfx card? anything like the following:
1) very limited picture with trails left on the screen by the mouse
2) PC boots but the screen won't display - you can hear windows loading jungle and icons on taskbar 'poping'
I only ask as I'm addin an old ATI9600 to my GF's machine and that's pretty much what it does. I think that it's a PSU defficiency

[SUBMAN1]

Originally Posted by jumpy

Subman1, what symptoms did you get with having an underpowered PSU trying to run your gfx card? anything like the following:
1) very limited picture with trails left on the screen by the mouse
2) PC boots but the screen won't display - you can hear windows loading jungle and icons on taskbar 'poping'
I only ask as I'm addin an old ATI9600 to my GF's machine and that's pretty much what it does. I think that it's a PSU defficiency

No - you get the vid card beeps on boot up with a blank screen - as in my case that is.

By the way - ATI 9600 has hardly any power draw. Try loading in safe mode (Hit F8 on startup) to see if you get a clear pic then. If so, you know its a driver issue. That is assuming you can see your system post correctly.

Issues that I have seen where there is lack of power involve very long boot times - like 5 to 10 minutes to boot as XP recovers from error after error. Not saying that it's the same across the board since lack of power has weird results like you describe, just that I haven't see a situation like yours. Only time I have seen a situation like you describe, though not as bad, is with a dying vid card that was fried (probably bad RAM on the vid card) from static electricity.

-S

[scandium]

Originally Posted by SUBMAN1

kiwi - You'd laugh at my heat sink! Massive is an understatement. Largest all copper sink I can find.

http://www.thermalright.com/a_page/m...duct_xp90C.htm

-S

Those first generation heat pipe HSFs are last years technology, though that's one of the newest and prettier models of that generation. I picked up one of these in February: http://www.arctic-cooling.com/cpu2.php?idx=80&disc=

It is suitably massive and has a nice car radiator look to it that I like, though its actually lighter than it looks and is one of the smaller coolers of this design type (the advantages of this design, aside from the heat pipes, is the orientation of it that pulls cool air from the front through the heat sink then across the capacitors at the edge of the board and out the rear exhaust.

The only probablem I'm having now is that with the hot summer heat and poor case design, my ambient temps inside the case are so high these days (41C case temp when I'm gaming) that even this cooler can't keep my modest 35% OC CPU stable anymore.

[Whistler]

I have a first Gen Core Duo Centrino in my laptop and I will never go back to a single core processor. Its like night and day when it comes to multitasking...