Conroe Performance Preview Follow-Up

The F.E.A.R. Issue

To the readers that pointed out our F.E.A.R. results as being unusually high, we owe you a sincere apology.  When we went back to test Conroe for the second time we re-ran all of our tests to make sure that no mistakes were made.  We caught the Quake 4 issue where Conroe’s SMP performance was understated, and we also discovered a problem in our F.E.A.R. testing. 

While our intention was to test both the AMD and Intel systems at the “Maximum” Computer settings and “High” Graphics settings, only the Conroe system was configured as such.  We inadvertently left the AMD system at a higher resolution (1280 x 960) instead of the default resolution (1024 x 768) when you select the “High” Graphics defaults.  The oversight was entirely our own doing as Intel was not running the benchmarks or configuring them, it simply happened while we were setting up both systems at the same time.  We played with different resolution settings and while deciding that we would go with one, managed to configure the two boxes differently. 

Of course this means that our initial F.E.A.R. tests were incorrect, and below we have the correct results with the settings we intended to run both systems on: 

The performance advantage of Conroe makes a lot more sense now, at 20% instead of 41%.  With performance in Quake 4, UT2004 and HL2 in the 20 - 30% faster range on Conroe, the F.E.A.R. results now make a lot more sense. 

To those who pointed out that even the CrossFire X1900 setup would be more GPU bound at 1280 x 960, you were very correct, our original results were inaccurate.  We do strive for accuracy and reliability in our results here at AnandTech, which is why we went back and retested/confirmed all of our initial findings before bringing you this update.  Aside from the F.E.A.R. and Quake 4 issues that we've since corrected, we found no other performance anomalies in our initial results.