Intel's Core Duo meets the desktop

Rounding things up...

Intel's Core Duo chips are certainly a massive step away from the Netburst architecture. Gone are the days of Intel focusing on ramping clock speeds in order to attain the performance required to compete with AMD's still impressive K8 architecture. Aside from a few feature omissions, Yonah could easily be a very good competitor to the Athlon 64 as a desktop processor, but we have to remember that it is only a mobile processor; a very good one at that.

The lack of 64-bit extensions may be a worry for some, as will the poor FPU performance - the latter showed up in our MP3 encoding test. However, if you disregard the poor MP3 encoding performance, the Core Duo T2600 matches up well to AMD's similarly priced Athlon 64 X2 4800+, even with a 233MHz clock speed deficit in 32-bit environments. From what we understand, all versions of Windows Vista will come in 32-bit, along with 64-bit versions for all but the entry level Starter Edition. We won't know whether there are performance gains from running the 64-bit versions of Vista and we will not be able to answer that until the product is released next year.

When Yonah is running at the same clock speed as AMD's Athlon 64 FX-60, we found that it beat it into a corner in just about every situation. The only situation where we didn't find the 2.6GHz Core Duo chip outperforming the FX-60 was in the MP3 encoding test. The most notable performance advantages were in our Xvid encoding test and all of the gaming scenarios.

AOpen's i975Xa-YDG motherboard is probably the best foundation to build a Yonah system around at the moment, and we are generally impressed with the way that it extracts Yonah's performance out in bucket loads. That is not to say that there aren't any areas with room for improvement, though. We would have liked to see Intel's full-blown ICH7R south bridge on the board, along with more tweak options in the BIOS in order to cater more for overclockers and enthusiasts looking to get the most out of this platform.

Having said that though, we were able to extract some rather amazing overclocking results out of both the board and the retail T2600 chip we managed to get hold of. Another thing that would have been nice to see is some improvements to the range of voltages and memory dividers offered by the board's BIOS.

Value:

We were unable to find AOpen's i975Xa-YDG motherboard in stock anywhere in the UK. We did find it available at a couple of stores in the US, though. This should help to give us a price indication over here. Buy.com is selling the board for $277.99 including free shipping, while PC Nation is selling for $284.06 - that also includes free shipping too. Taking these prices into account, we'd expect the board to retail for around £180 when it hits our shores - that's about as much as the DFI LANParty UT CFX3200-DR.

We were a little bit more successful finding the Core Duo chips in the UK. Scan has four different Core Duo chips in stock, starting at £161.16 for the T2300, going up to £427.69 including VAT for the T2600. The Core Duo T2600 is almost a direct competitor to the Athlon 64 X2 4800+, which retails for £409.46 including VAT - we think that the extra £20 is worth it, in many respects. However, if you're considering SLI, the Core Duo platform doesn't currently have an NVIDIA SLI-certified motherboard on the market and we don't know whether this will happen any time soon.

Another thing to consider is the ease at which this CPU overclocked - we've not been able to overclock CPUs in this way for a long while now. In that respect, it is worth comparing it to AMD's flagship part too. A part that it beat in virtually every benchmark excluding the MP3 encoding test. The Athlon 64 FX-60 currently sells for £586.63 including VAT, making the Core Duo T2600 over £150 cheaper. Rumours from the Far East suggest that Core Duo is set to recieve a price drop when the chip giant announces the Core Duo T2700 in June, too - that could shake things up even more.

Lets also not forget that AMD is set to launch its AM2 platform next week if all goes to plan, too.

Final Thoughts…

It has taken the chip giant a long time to get there, but we think that things are certainly looking bright for the boys in blue. If anything, Yonah serves as a taste of things to come, with Conroe coming to desktop, and Merom – its cousin – coming to mobile later this summer. We should start to see those chips coming to market over the next couple of months. We are expecting both Conroe and Merom to improve on the firm foundations that Intel has laid with its Yonah chip, and we could be in for an exciting second half of 2006.

If anything, our only concern is the availability of AOpen's i975Xa-YDG motherboard. We were unable to find it in stock anywhere in the UK at the time of publication. If this board surfaces from the dust, a Core Duo system could be an interesting option for gamers to consider if they are looking to use a single video card, or even a pair of Radeon X1900's in CrossFire mode.