[Chrysalis]

interesting that intel just using 64bit extensions.

I got a c2d following rave reviews from all over the place and in my honest opinion I have found some flaws in both the chip and the chipset.

1 - I get problems when there is high ram utilisation and some stuttering in video media, this doesnt happen on my "lower" spec amd64 and I suspect it may be due to the c2d lack of a hypertransport and integrated ddr2 core.
2 - the intel speedstep is a bit dissapointing in that it doesnt actually downclock by a lot from 2.6ghz down to 2ghz. I heard later revisions of the c2d have fixed this.
3 - the ide chipset is poor, it supports plain ide, ahci and raid. ahci has no support for write caching at all in the drivers, the raid drivers do support write caching but only when using raid5 mode, plain ide has no intel drivers whatsoever and the microsoft drivers are used. Lots of people sing intels praises on the ich7/8/9 chipsets but they all using raid modes and in particular hardware review sites all specifically tested the raid functions and not single drive setups. When I emailed intel about the limitations they simply told me to use the plain ide mode which doesnt utilise features such as native command queuing.