Core 2 Duo is clearly a very capable processor, but there are some areas where it could be faster. It's not often that we're spoiled by something that completely blows us out of the water, but this could be it - if anything, it leaves us wanting more. However, we have some worries about its multi-tasking performance, which doesn't appear to be quite as good as the chip that Conroe will be replacing later this year.
We found that it was faster than the current flagship Pentium Extreme Edition 965 processor in nearly every single-threaded scenario, but there were times where Conroe fell behind in multi-tasking scenarios. One area that completely blew us out of the water was the sheer prowess when it comes to gaming. This is an area where Intel has been traditionally weak.
This initial preview serves as an indication as to Conroe's performance - but again, we iterate that we will draw our final conclusions as to its performance when we have the complete, shipping hardware in our hands - something that no website or company has yet, save Intel.
One thing that we can't wait to find out is just how much you've got to spend in order to get equivalent performance to today's current flagship CPU - AMD's Athlon 64 FX-62. We can't wait to find out later this summer.
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