Before we start with any testing of any kind, we should learn a little bit about this new processor. The Conroes currently will have up to 2.93 GHz clock speed (X6800 part), up to 4 Mb of L2 cache store, will use a technology called Speedstep and it is of course dual core 64-Bit. The biggest selling point of Conroe is possibly the fact that it is reputed to have an outstanding potential for overclocking and at the same time not requiring lots of power.
So far it sounds like it can take care of itself, so lets put it to the grindstone to find out if it is truly as good as Intel claim it to be. We always do our very best to give a new product a fighting chance to prove itself to us during our initial testing. In this case we did more than just give it a fighting chance; we completely put the Conroe in an all out assault machine. That’s right we decided we would build a complete system around this new processor. In order to get an initial idea of how the processor will perform we should take a closer look at the machine that we put it in. The systems specifications are as follows:

The Intel boards are Crossfire ready, but SLI isnt supported. Probably Nvidia will address this issue at some point in time, but for now we are limited to the 7950GX2 if we want to get the absolute best from Intel and Nvidia.

As the icing on the cake, as if the system wasn’t enough, we water cooled the whole thing to give it a little more capacity for heat dissipation and allow for that extra 100MHz. So by now your probably thinking if they water cooled the entire system, did they water cool the Nvidia 7950GX2?  Well, have a closer look at the below pictures and read on!

Intel Bad Axe configuration:

Asus P5DH Deluxe configuration:

Here we have a link to this beast machine if anyone wants to check the price. It looks like AMD will have hard time to beat the price and get the same performance though