The Intel Core 2 Extreme / Core Duo Processor Review / Intel X6800 Core 2 Extreme

The Fast and the Furious!!! =)

Intel has taken a lot of heat over the last couple of years as AMD has taken over a vast amount of their desktop market, a place they could not be touched in previous times, and this has hurt Intel more than they will ever admit. AMD actually beat them at their own game, changed the way they name and design CPUs, and released their FX brand, which out performed the Intel solution almost across the board.

The AMD FX62 was the fastest Dual-Core CPU on the market until this release and it makes me proud of AMD for finally getting their act together as a major force in the Industry.

Intel on the other hand has soured me with a few CPUs that ran so hot that nothing short of a liquid cooling system could keep them from massively overheating and shutting down my PC. This area alone is a strange turn of events as AMD traditionally was the guy who had the hot CPUs, but until Conroe, AMD has had the cooler running CPUs as Intel's high-end Pressler's ran at least 20 Celsius hotter than a comparable FX CPU. This is really the main reason I think Intel has taken such a hit in the desktop retail market. Let's just face it heat is the enemy, and when your CPU is so hot that standard cooling becomes beyond obsolete there is a big problem to the enthusiasts user base.

I believe those days are over with the release of the Conroe series as their new CPUs run at a lovely 25 Celsius running under a full load, which is actually lower than a human's body temperature of 98.6 Fahrenheit. The new FX62 runs at about 32-35 C using stock cooling, that although not too hot is still hotter than the new breed of Conroe's by a small margin. From what we have seen of Conroe so far, Intel is ready to kick ass and take names again in the CPU arena and offer no apologies. Today we take a look at two of the top end offerings in the new Core 2 and Duo lineup, the X6800 and E6700 CPUs. Gone now are the old-school naming conventions used in previous years as Intel has also abandoned the name game that used core speeds as the CPU name. Today's CPUs get lovely names like the X6800, which sounds like an ATI card, the E6300-6700s, sounding like motherboards, to the 805-945 CPUs that do not generate in my opinion catchy names, but hey I liked my CPUs when they had a simple Intel 3.4GHz EE or 3.8GHz P4 nomenclature. Beyond opinion and rhetoric though Intel has done a great job and I feel that this will be their redemption to their loyal fan base of users. Follow along and see what's under the hood of Intel's new Conroe series.

• Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800
• 2.93 GHz dual Core CPU
• 1066MHz FSB
• 4MB unified L2 cache
• Intel Virtualization technology
• Execue Disable Bit
• Intel Extended Memory 64 Technology (EM64T)
• Intel Wide Dynamic Execution
• Intel Smart Memory Access
• Intel Advanced Smart Cache
• Intel Advanced Digital Media Boost
• 65 nanometer technology
• 291 million transistors

This is the current top of the line CPU from Intel and takes over as their flagship desktop CPU. Previously code named Conroe the X6800 Extreme is the Creme De La Creme of High-End CPUs. Intel's new Extreme Dream comes at us with Dual 2.93GHz CPU technology, 4MB of unified level 2 Cache and runs at a FSB speed of 1066MHz.

World Financial Crisis

Welcome to my Blog

Lets talk about the current world financial crisis...

The global financial crisis of 2008–2009 is an ongoing major financial crisis. It became prominently visible in September 2008 with the failure, merger, or conservatorship of several large United States-based financial firms. The underlying causes leading to the crisis had been reported in business journals for many months before September, with commentary about the financial stability of leading U.S. and European investment banks, insurance firms and mortgage banks consequent to the subprime mortgage crisis.

Beginning with failures of large financial institutions in the United States, it rapidly evolved into a global credit crisis, deflation and sharp reductions in shipping resulting in a number of European bank failures and declines in various stock indexes, and large reductions in the market value of equities (stock) and commodities worldwide. The credit crisis was exacerbated by Section 128 of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 which allowed the Federal Reserve System to pay interest on excess reserve requirement balances held on deposit from banks, removing the longstanding incentive for banks to extend credit instead of hoard cash on deposit with the Fed.

The crisis led to a liquidity problem and the de-leveraging of financial institutions especially in the United States and Europe, which further accelerated the liquidity crisis, and a decrease in international shipping and commerce. World political leaders and national ministers of finance and central bank directors have coordinated their efforts to reduce fears but the crisis is ongoing and continues to change, evolving at the close of October into a currency crisis with investors transferring vast capital resources into stronger currencies such as the yen, the dollar and the Swiss franc, leading many emergent economies to seek aid from the International Monetary Fund. The crisis was triggered by the subprime mortgage crisis and is an acute phase of the financial crisis of 2007–2009.