Last week, Intel gathered the European press in Munich for a sneak peek at its the Core 2 Duo chip - aka 'Conroe'. The Reg Hardware was there. They were limited to running a set of pre-installed benchmarks on the systems provided so this isn't a conclusive performance review of what Core 2 Duo is capable of, but anyway it's interesting to see some sort of comparison against the AMD Athlon 64 FX-62:

The overall PCMark 2005 score is more than 1,100 points higher than the FX-62's score which is nothing short of incredible as the FX-62 is a higher-clocked processor, although some of this has to be credited to the graphics cards. The default render test in POV-Ray shaved 1m 12s off the FX-62 in dual-core mode. Conroe was 2m 12s faster when both CPUd were running in single core mode. With results like this Intel better have a stock pile of processors lined out to be ready to ship if nothing changes from now on.

The 3D results are similarly impressive and although I don't have any exact comparisons and was only able to run the tests at fairly low resolutions, they bode very well. Intel had a couple of FX-60 systems set up as well, both overclocked to 2.8GHz and with a similar setup to the Core 2 Duo machines. For a rough comparison the Core 2 Duo system managed to produce 367fps in FarCry on the training level, whereas the FX-60 machine only mustered 250fps. As this was at 1,024 x 768 resolution it is likely that the gap will narrow at higher resolutions, but Intel has an amazing lead here.

A default 3DMark 06 score of 9709 is quite impressive as well, but not as good as 199fps in F.E.A.R. at 1,024x768 at optimal performance settings for the platform. The reason for the F.E.A.R. score being especially noteworthy is because this is a very CPU-limited game. Sure, Intel had fitted two very fast graphics cards in the machine as well, but the results are almost twice as fast as any other platform out there. Remember that this was on a fairly default setup without any tweaks that I could spot to make it go faster.

In related news, OverclockersOnline forum has a few benchmarks on the Intel Core 2 Duo E6800 on an MSI board too.

Update: Another benchmarks can be found on THG.