Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 & E6400: Tremendous Value Through Overclocking
by Anand Lal Shimpi on July 26, 2006 8:17 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Application Performance using PC WorldBench 5
Switching over to WorldBench 5, all of the scores become much closer. The spread between the fastest and slowest tested processor is only 38%, and overclocking of the E6300 and E6400 by 39% and 35% results in a 20% and 17% performance increase, respectively. Given the number of applications being tested in WorldBench 5, the overall results are not too surprising. Some tests are CPU limited while others are bottlenecked by hard drive performance. Athlon 64 X2 is more competitive in this benchmark, and the truth is that any of these systems would be more than fast enough for typical home/office use. If you want the fastest current CPU architecture, however, that title clearly belongs to Intel's Core 2.
WorldBench 5's applications are a bit older than those used in SYSMark 2004, and the data sets not as large - meaning that the smaller cache of the E6300 and E6400 has less of a negative impact. The result is that the 2.88GHz E6400 performs very close to the 2.93GHz X6800 and the 2.59GHz E6300 performs very close to the 2.66GHz E6700. Compared to AMD, the overclocked E6300 does quite well - at 2.592GHz the E6300 is already faster than AMD's Athlon 64 FX-62 - and we're talking $183.
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coldpower27 - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
Assuming you have the Socket AM2 platform, then yes you can, remember 5000+ only exists for Socket AM2, and not Socket 939.Since that platform is relatively new, only a handful who have would consider upgrading to anything.
Gigahertz19 - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
I'm definetly going with the Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 @ 2.4GHz since it is the cheapest one that has 4Mb of L2 cache and overclock it to 3GHz or whatever is stable.Olaf van der Spek - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
I'm also missing any mention of single core solutions. Sure, dual core is the future, but in the present, single core is just as fast for games and a lot cheaper.An Athlon 64 3800+ 2.4 ghz costs only 110 dollar/euro.
krisia2006 - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
AMD left me wanting for an affordable dual core cpu and Intel answered.I bought the Pentium Ds and will buy the Core 2 Duo.
In the present, I play games fine on my Pentium Ds.
Olaf van der Spek - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
Isn't way too much attention given to CF/SLI?
Given the costs, it's only interesting to 'diehard' gamers that spend very much money on their systems.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
The benefits in some games are huge, and I would say just about any gamer would at least *think* about CF/SLI before making a decision as to what to buy. That doesn't mean they have to go that route, but without CF/SLI you will certainly be GPU limited at higher resolutions. This is a well-established fact, as in recent titles you can't run 1600x1200 or 1680x1050 with 4xAA/8xAF and still get CPU-limited results.samuraiBX - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
Hey guys, I like the article, but I was wondering, why did you go with medium settings instead of ultra high or high? I'd like to see the performance in that arena more than the medium settings. Any chance we could get those? Thanks!coldpower27 - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
The performance is obvious, even on a Crossfire system with image quality settings tunred up you will get a straight line down the middle between NetBurst, K8, and Core based products due to the GPU being the bottleneck, since the emphasis was CPU performance, they need to kick back on the GPU settings a tad to make sue the CPU is the limiting factor.Real world, a Pentium D 915/945 would be sufficient for gaming.
bob661 - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
What impresses me the most about these Conroe's is their OCing ability. Almost as fast as a Conroe EE for less than a 1/4 of its price.mkruer - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
You might want to pick up the new stepping 6 (mass produces ones) A lot of people over at xteamesystesm are complaining that the stepping 6 doesn’t over clock nearly as well as the stepping 5 and that the temperatures are staring to go though the roof.Personally I would love to know if this is true
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...">http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...