INQ Conroe reviewed as a processing matter

THE IM CAME in just after four in the morning, and at first it sounded great, I get to do a Conroe review! Yay high powered gaming reviews! Then the problems started to mount, the first question was "You have one, don't you?" Sadly I didn't, but it was Thursday morning, or very late Wednesday night, depending on how you count, I had a week to get it together.

Slightly more problematic was that I had to be on a plane to Semicon bright and early, but not 4am early, it is still dark then, on Monday morning. That left me with a day and a half to get a Conroe and mobo, pirate what parts I could from the INQUIRER MidWest Office Complex Bin-O-Stuff, and wrangle what little was left from people. Not a problem, I had planty of stuff to pirate.

I cheerily said OK, it would get done, and went off to the Bin-O-Stuff to start digging. Fastest GPUs? 2 7800GTXs. Intel i875 is a great CPU, but NVidia plays licensing games, so no SLI there. A single 7800 would be overwhelmed by a Conroe XE in less time than you can say 'bottleneck'. Not good, but I had some X1900s on the way, I could call about them when the world wakes up.

On to RAM, DDR2 RAM to be specific. DDR2-800 low latency to be more specific. Cool, I had DDR2 in an 840EE box, things were looking brighter. I pulled the sticks, and the good side was they said DDR2, the bad news was it was followed by -533 5-5-5-12. Oh yuck. The other sticks were notably slower. Really yuck. More phone calls to make once the west coast wakes up.

On to hard drives, and the one of choice here is a WD Raptor. Cool, I had one! One part of five is not bad. The PSU from the SLI rig would work nicely too, it is 550W, so again, no problem. Two of five! Assuming I could actually get a Conroe the next day, I would have a merely impossible task of getting RAM and ATI GPUs next day'd to me with no notice. Things were looking up.

At 8am the phone calls started, time to cash in the favors. Intel is always on the ball, no question there. The Conroe that was coming my way already was pulled in a week, so the cause wasn't totally lost. I had more than half the parts on the way or in hand. Success at last, I might just have an entire weekend of watching timedemos run after all.

The GPUs were confirmed to have been shipped the day before, so I should actually get them today, probably any second now knowing when Fed-Ex normally shows up. Tracking number to follow the email read. While I was waiting, I think it was time to put up the storm shutters and check on my insurance, the universe has this way of making one pay if too much is going good. If I could get RAM, my neighborhood was in for some spotty weather, the locusts and tornadoes of the dual core review days would be topped somehow. I was thinking fire.

The email came back a few minutes later, shipping was waiting for a bit of info, they are still on the loading dock. They would go out today, and since it was Fed-Ex, it would be there tomorrow. The new roof the neighbors put on was going to be spared, this was probably only monsoon and golf-ball sized hail level universal retribution territory.

RAM was the last of the bunch, mainly because Kingston is a west coast company, and they get up late. Their PR is really really good, so this was actually the least of my worries, and if worse comes to worse, I could probably find some DDR2-800 locally, maybe not with good timings, but it would at least boot.

The last part, the PSU, was pulled off the SLI rig that also sacrificed the Raptor. Data was backed up, misc cables dug out from under the workbench where the cat batted them, and a space was cleared in the piles of junk to set it up on. Now it is time to wait.

Friday morning arrived, and so did two of the three packages. Memory and CPU/Mobo, enough to build a system that runs, but not hugely well. OK, it would be fine as long as the best game you wanted to run was Descent, I've got a Ms. PacMan machine in the living room, so I could just play that if I wanted 2D. Maybe Fed-Ex was going to bring it by in the afternoon, but let's check just in case.

Tracking number showed the package hit the Fed-Ex depot in Canada just after 5pm Thursday, so far so good. The problem was the usual 'transferred by a guy named Zeke with missing teeth onto a truck', followed by 'on a plane', then 'at customs', 'in Memphis', 'in Minneapolis' and 'being held by an impatient guy in purple shorts banging on your door right now' were all missing. Hmmm, not good, but Fed-Ex, king of logistics never botches something badly, so it was probably a site glitch. Time for human intervention.

10 minutes of phone maze aggravation later, I got someone on the phone, a chipper young lady who politely answered my questions. 'Yes, we picked it up yesterday, and it should be delivered to you this morning'. The fact that it was this afternoon, morning ended several hours ago, did not dawn on her, which explains why she had a lucrative career as a phone bank worker. Following that, she has a bright future ahead of her as a middle manager.

Once it was explained to her that it did not come with the other two boxes that Fed-Ex did bring that morning, and the web site still showed it was sitting on a shelf in the colder north, I could hear a lot of typing. After a few bouts of 'can you hold sir', she did confirm it was sitting on said shelf. It would be delivered first thing Monday, and they were indeed very sorry.

I explained politely to her that there was a reason these things were next day'd, and it did not involve a charity program for Fed-Ex stockholders. If it came Monday, I would be 1500 miles away, and the box would be returned long before I got back to the state. It was about as useful to me as a brick if it came Monday.

Then came the words we all know and love, the real reason we use Fed-Ex, the customer service, and the way they bend over backwards to help you. 'I'm sorry sir, there is nothing I can do'. Time to end the politeness charade. It was soon made clear to her that it would be at my house on Saturday, or I would yell my way up the food chain until I got sick of yelling, then I would hand the phone off to friends who would yell for me, and I did indeed have nothing better to do all weekend than pester Fed-Ex.

'Please hold sir'.

Soon after, it was agreed they would have it to the depot on Saturday morning, and I would pick it up. I never hear the doorbell due to the din of equipment in the lab, and the fact that it doesn't work, so they agreed to call me the second it came in, and I would pick it up. If it hit the truck, I wouldn't get it, and by the time the truck got back to the depot, the depot would be closed, I have played this game before. Yelling over, problem solved.

6:53am Saturday, the web site showed it was at the depot, but no phone calls, they were probably waiting till 8am, reasonable in light of it being Saturday morning. A bit after 8, Fed-Ex updated the web site to cheerily tell me that the box was on the truck. Blink. Time to find a profanity generator on the net, and feed it a seed string of 'retarded monkeys' to start off.

10 more minutes of phone maze later, I got another chipper person who told me a wonderful story about them never saying me they would hold it, I could just get it from the driver, there was no calls promised, and either way, I should be glad to get it thank you very much. Several statements about simian excrement and maternal lineage later, I was promised a response soon. 30 minutes later, there was a driver at my door, and someone from half a world away on the phone telling me he was indeed there.

All parts in, it was almost noon Saturday, and I hastily slapped everything together. It powered up, but the DVD was giving off all sorts of unfriendly noises, so down to the local store to buy a new one. Mission accomplished, it was time for bed.

Just after midnight, I got my first revelation about Conroe while installing Windows, it was fast, and I mean really really stinking fast. When you install Windows as much as I do, you get a rough idea of how long things are going to take, once you hit the drive formatting screen, you pick your option, and go away for half an hour before it asks you for more input.

This whole 30 minute process probably took less than 5. I was pretty stunned, this rig was seriously fast. The unpacking of the .CABs was barely noticeable as they flashed by, and my jaw nearly hit the ground. Good things were going to come out of this.

The nice part of the chipset Intel sends out is that it is the tried and true i975, and the board is the commercially available 'badaxe'. The drivers have been on the web site for ages, no hunting around, no untested bits with asterisks all over the instruction sheet. Windows up, drivers on a memory stick, and things were looking up.

During the installation of the .NET framework for the ATI drivers, the machine crashed, and crashed hard. When the speakers squeak, and there is not so much as an attempt at an error screen, it is bad. From then on, thing simply would not run stably, installers stopped silently half way through, the sound card tray icon took over a minute to come up, and the ATI control panel would not come up most of the time. Games would bomb out, usually hard rebooting the system without error messages. Damn.

Luckily though, it was barely past 3am, and I had 24 hours to get this done, sleep be damned. Time to reinstall and no drivers to hunt down this time. Did I mention that this chip will install Windows screamingly, stupidly fast? This is a really really good thing when you are pressed for time. The second time around, the drivers were in hand, and things took next to no time. Drivers all went in easily, desktop came up without delay, and life was good.

Time to install games, start out with the torture test, Oblivion and the 'Chuck' patch followed by 3DMark06 for a baseline. All went well, no hiccups, time to see what I was dealing with. All options on, Oblivion was smooth and fast, none of the mild stutters you could induce on an FX-60 and SLI'd 7800s. It was smooth, really smooth.

Then it crashed.

Damn.

Tried again. 5 minutes in, about the point where you get to kill your first bad guy, crash.

Let's try 3DMark, shall we? Just after the CPU tests, blammo. Hard crash. Something was very wrong. It was stupidly fast, but a little less than optimal in the stability department. You can't adjust the ram timing on this board, so try another set of sticks. Crash. Slower sticks? Crash. Hmm, probably not ram if 4 different sets from 3 vendors took it down. Heat? The CPU heatsink was not even warm, but the northbridge and the heatsinks on the GPUs were hot, but nothing you could not touch with bare skin.

Two 12 inch fans and a single 24 inch blowing across the mobo took care of that, the best I could do was make them lukewarm. Surfed the web for a bit, downloaded a few files, watched a few video clips, flash animations and the rest, and it was rock stable. Fired up Oblivion, crash. 3DMark06? Crash. OK, every time the GPUs were stressed, blammo, and this was my first Crossfire rig, so lets take that out of the equation. With only one GPU, the performance on Oblivion was notably downgraded, but luckily, it still crashed. So did 3DMark. Damn. Damn damn damn.

By now, it was early Sunday afternoon. Time to go PSU shopping, that was my best guess right now, X1900s draw a bit more juice than a 7800GTX/256 does, so it might be overloading a rail. If you have ever tried to get a Crossfire-ready PSU at 3pm on a Sunday in Minnesota, let me tell you, it is a treat.

'What are you going to put it in?' the clerk asked, adding something about his encyclopedic hardware knowledge, while pointing me to the CompUSA brand 350W PSU. 'It is a good one'. 'Conroe XE with X1900XTXs in Crossfire, and some Raptors'. If you have ever watched a fish gasp for air while wondering why it couldn't breathe, you understand the look this guy gave.

It quickly became apparent the big box stores could only get what I needed shipped to me in 5-10 days. The local enthusiast shop is closed all day, and I am on a plane before they opened Monday. Damn. I guess that this is the universal karmic backhand for actually getting all the parts in record time, the one part you have is not up to the task.

So, Monday morning rolled around, and it was off to the airport. Problems unsolved, and the embargo was up long before I would be back in the same state as the parts. All was almost for naught, almost because there were no hard numbers generated, but I did get a good fell for the Conroe and X1900 Crossfire setup.

As I kept mentioning earlier, this chip is notably faster than anything out there, it is really really fast. I can't emphasize that enough. When the sites that spend a lot of brainpower splitting a story up into 27 pages, and kick themselves because a bar graph just can't be spread across three pages, all wax rhapsodic about how a 200MHz increase is a life changing experience, speed tends to lose meaning. 1% may technically be a measurable gain, but to the lives of the average gamer, it won't make a difference. In fact, it isn't worth an upgrade, much less paying three or four digits for.

Conroe with Crossfire is worth it.

Not since the 939 A64 hit the market has there been such a huge step forward in CPU power. The things my previous box could be made to chug on, Oblivion mostly, this simply powers through. I didn't have enough time to beat it into the ground, but the time I spent with Conroe showed that it was clearly the fastest box I have ever used.

Since late last year, people have been feeding me numbers, and hinting at what was coming, Conroe delivers on all that and more. Due to the disconnect between measurement and perception, you can't feel things that are measurable at times, it tends to take a big bang to catch a jaded eye like mine. Conroe did that.

From what I have seen, all the rumors were true. There is no cheating, no trick drivers, no baked setups, or anything underhanded, it is just faster. Several potential AMD responses have crossed my inbox, but until they show up and are independently measurable, Conroe is the fastest thing you can buy, and completely lives up to the hype. ?