Intel Core Duo on Desktops

Well, as noted before, the hotest processor right now is the Intel Core Duo and the motherboard folks are adapting their desktop designs to put it on the desktop. The true desktop Core Duos don’t ship until later this year, so it’s interesting to get the performance Intel is seeing on the iMac on Windows only machines. Great news is that the T2400 1.83GHz overclocks very well with the new AOpen i975Xa-YDG (say that fast three times). You get a 54% over clock to 2.8GHz as noted at “Anandtech”:http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2750&p=4 at a very nominal 1.4V vs. 1.25V default and it stayed at 36C to 39C with the stock cooling fan!

So enthusiasts, get ready for the next round of, do it yourself. That is amazing particular when you overclock the Corsair CM2X1024-6400Pro DDR2 memory to 3-3-3-8 at 1.9V. The performance by the way is astounding. It matched an AMD Opteron (Athlon 64 roughly) at every clock frequency from 1.83GHz to 2.8GHz, so the AMD performance advantage is no more. And for CPU intensive operations like MP3 encoding, it seems faster, doubtlessly because of its gigantic 4MB cache.

The same is true in “gaming” performance, long an AMD stronghold. Battlefield 2, Call of Duty 2 and F.E.A.R. equalled or bettered the AMD processor. So that rocks. The main drawback is the motherboard costs $290. That’s pretty amazingly high.

And as another aside in shameless Apple copying, ASUS’s new PW201 is an 20.1″ LCD monitor with an embedded 1.3MP Webcam according to “Anandtech”:http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=2171. That will be a nice monitor to add to an Intel Duo setup.

I’m Rich & Co.

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