Hi to all. I would like to first start off by saying I am truly a performance junkie/ fan, and I am not loyal to any brand in particular once there is performance to back up the marketing hype I will purchase it.

I myself manage my own business, which consists of PC Repairs, Custom Built PCs, sale of PC Components, and a Gaming LAN Café, I find myself at the front line of technology specifically so I can guide my customers in the right direction based on their individual habbits and what they need their pc to do.

I have been in this business full-time for over the past five years. I have built computers with AMD and Intel during this time period. AMD have indeed come a long way for a small company, and over the last 3 years have shown themselves capable of producing very competitive products that have always seemed to edge the performance over Intel especially for users who use their pc’s primarily for gaming purposes and therefore need raw horsepower.

Intel cpu’s on the other hand have been superior with their multi tasking, and video encoding capabilities. Thus making a clear cut decision what you use your pc for primarily one would decide whether to go Intel or AMD.

Since the AMD Athlon64 came on the scene they have dominated Intel up until August 2006 with the release of Core2Duo. I myself have recently purchased an E6600 since I was due for an upgrade for quite a while, since I usually upgrade with a new PC setup at least once a year.

I thought it only fair to give AMD X2 a try before my complete system overall, so I did a minor upgrade by replacing my single core Opteron 148 which I had running daily @2.86GHz, with an X2 4400 which I of course overclocked to daily run @ 2.67GHz.

I immediately noticed the difference in multi-tasking but felt a slight slowdown while gaming, since very very few games use dual core power presently, and my Opteron was superior of course when it came to gaming since it had higher clockspeeds than what I was able to achieve with the X2.

Seeing that I have tried both sides of the camp (Intel & AMD) I can give a reasonably unbiased review and comparison of the Core2Duo and AMD X2. I choose the most recent release of futuremark which is 3DMark 2006 to prove my point. Gaming is by far the most intensive work a PC can do, because it uses all parts of your computer simultaneously.

Gaming uses;
1. Processor
2. Hard Drive
3. Ram
4. Graphics Card
5. Sound Card

Now to the facts;

PC users with overclocked AMD64/ X2 chips, would not feel much of an increase in performance by getting a Core2Duo chip particularly in the area of gaming or regular daily tasks. The Core2Duo chips excel in video encoding/rendering which I can strongly vouch for, especially a highly overclocked one will tear a similarly clocked X2 to shreds in this department.

PC users with Pentium4 / PentiumD processors would notice a huge increase in performance by upgrading to a Core2Duo processor in all aspects of daily computing because of the inferiority of the Pentium 4 processors compared to AMD64 /X2 and Core2Duo overall.

Thus the reason why Intel fans and AMD fans need not to be down each other’s throat about who has the better cpu. If you never used a PC with an AMD64 /X2 cpu then you have no claims or knowledge whatsoever about how much superior the new Core2Duo is over AMD64 especially in gaming/ basic daily computer usage, especially a highly overclocked one. (Unless of course if you are a review junky, but personal experience always beats a review)

Intel have took the performance crown back from AMD, and that is why I have an Intel setup presently because I am a fan of performance and not branded and/or loyal to any particular brand of anything (besides nVidia gfx cards).

Being that I have owned both setups I can clearly state that running a stock E6600 @2.4GHz compared to my previous X2 4400 @ 2.67GHz the performance difference in gaming is minute if there is any. To prove this theory we will use 3Dmark06 for comparison, since it measures GPU & CPU performance separately. Using my faithful 7900GT @ 650/870MHz for both setups.

Next, the setups and results.