The chaps over at THG pit the best from AMD and the best from Intel and overclocks both of them until the blood pours out. The Core2 Extreme goes up to 3.68GHz and the Athlon FX 64 up to 3.05GHz. AMD's performance increased by just over 7% while the Core went all the way up by nearly 17%!

A quick look at the power consumption we measured during our testing also shows that an overclocked Intel system under heavy load requires 29 fewer watts than the AMD unit, while delivering 30 percent more performance. The strengths of the overclocked AMD system showed up at the other end of the usage spectrum under light or idle loads. In that case, the AMD system consumed 29 fewer watts than did the Intel Core 2 Extreme.

We also took a look at our lab engineers' notebooks. Raising the FSB and memory clocks on the Intel system increased memory throughput from 5.7 to 7.3 GB/s. AMD's integrated memory controller enabled memory throughput for the Athlon 64 FX-62 to increase from 9.3 GB/s to a record-breaking value of 10.7 GB/s.

Want an comparison of a more mundane, everyday sort? Try this on for size: the overclocked Intel system compressed an entire 2.5 hour movie on DVD in under 6 minutes! This involved converting from DVD9 to DVD4.7 formats. The real strengths of the Intel Core 2 clearly lie in the video realm: the Intel system converts a 2 hour movie into the well-known DivX format in 93 minutes, whereas the AMD system takes 155, or just more than one hour longer, to complete the same task.