Intel Core 2 Duo. I don't understand...

[martinistripes]

How can the P9500 be faster than the P9600, when the P9600 runs at a higher frequency and all other specifications appear to be the same?

Even more confusing... the P8700 scores a higher PassMark than both, yet it has the same clock speed as the P9500 and less L2 cache.

The reason I ask is I'm in the process of buying a new machine, and after seeing the PassMark scores unable to settle on a processor. The P9500 is £75 more than the P9600, yet the notebook company assure me that despite the PassMark benchmarks the P9600 is the superior CPU.

Does the PassMark score miss some aspect of CPU performance? Are Intel really working backwards making their CPUs slower?

[David (PassMark)]

There is only 3 examples of the P9600 CPU in our database. If you look at the individual results you can see that one of the results is low. My guess would be that is it was in a laptop running on battery power as the clock speed was 60% below peak speed.

There is one similar case amoung the P9500 results, but with a larger number of good samples the bad way is almost averaged away.

There are also other factors that influence the result.

The P8700 result is very close to the P9500. Close enough that other factors, like the operating system version and motherboard impact the result.

[martinistripes]

Ah, okay. That explains things.

Thanks for the info. Great website by the way, shame about the occasional odd ball results upsetting the scores.

As a constructive suggestion, how about increasing the number of minimum results to say five. Or maybe the Passmark software could possible detect systems running on batteries and prevent them from submitting a score.

[David (PassMark)]

If we made the limit 5 for inclusion then you (and many others) would complain that we didn't list the P9600

We already get weekly complaints that super rare CPUs are missing from the list.

We manually delete some bad results and automatically exclude others in certain circumstances. But there is always going to be strange stuff going on as we get around 500 new results per day.

[martinistripes]

Fair enough. Anyway, the sites a new permenant addition to my bookmarks.

...and I will be sure to submit my score for the P9600 in the very near future!

Thanks again.