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 Winstone 2004
Winstone 2004 consists of two different benchmark suites; the Business Winstone test focuses on office applications, while the Multimedia Content Creation benchmark contains many audio/visual applications that are more CPU limited.
As with WorldBench 5, results in both Winstone 2004 suites are relatively close together. The spread in the Multimedia Content Creation test is 38% while the spread in the Business Winstone test is only 32.5%. This reflects the fact that the business applications generally spent most of their time waiting on the user for input. Overclocking continues to give the 2 MB Core 2 Duo chips a reasonable performance boost, however, putting them relatively close to the performance of the $500-$1000 E6700/X6800. If you don't demand absolute maximum performance and are looking to save some money, both chips will keep you very happy.
With the extremely low prices of AMD's X2 processors, the price/performance offered is still certainly competitive. In all of the general performance testing that we have presented here, an X2 3800+ or X2 4200+ (with or without overclocking) is by no means a slow processor. Core 2 Duo is faster, though at present we also have to conclude that Core 2 Duo motherboards are more expensive (with the exception of the ASRock board, though that has a few drawbacks). If you are looking for something right now and are looking to save money, socket AM2 has a lot of reasonable choices at very good prices. For the business user, you really can't go wrong with any of these chips.
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goinginstyle - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
Read the entire post and see what the outcome is before posting this kind of information.
Kiijibari - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
That's the reason why he was using stepping 5 cores, if he would have used stepping 6, no article, no clicks, no advertising money (from Intel(?) ;-) )
I mean an overclocking article itself is nonsense, exspecially if you only have 1 kind of a specific CPU and that one is directly from Intel...
Just wait until the first guys bought E6300s because of anandtech and then stuck around ~2.0/2.2 GHz. Guess who is angry then ...
Sadly but it looks like anandtech does not care too much about that :(
regards
Kiijibari
Gary Key - Saturday, July 29, 2006 - link
The retail chips are overclocking just as well as the ES chips from all indications the past few days. I know my retail E6400 is 150MHz higher than the ES sample. ;-) Here is an example at XS.......
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php...">E6700 Retail
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
As soon as we can get our hands on something other than B1 stepping CPUs we'll include those results. As far as I know, there's nothing that has been changed in current silicon revisions to severely limit overclocking. I haven't run into the issues myself but I will do my best to follow up once I can get later silicon.Take care,
Anand
mkruer - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
Thanks Anand,I don’t know if this is true any more but I seem to recall that Intel has a small scale FAB just for engineering samples, and I think that they tend to use it both as a test to validate the new FAB process as well as the CPU design. Thus the engineering samples tend to be better then the mass production chips. Remember the 5 GHz Prescott Intel showed off. I don’t think that anyone go a 5 GHz Prescott running from production chips without having to use liquid nitrogen to keep the chip cool.
This is something to keep in mind when benching the ES ability. The real production chip might be totally different from a thermal and OC aspect.
mine - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
its been reported that there is one change in b2 retail stepping .based on 3 6800 retail versions (b2) @ (xs) b1 stepping seem to oc better than the retail versions
so right now it seems to early to prejudge ..
PetNorth - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
Anand, your X2 4200+ $215 is wrong. It's EE version. Normal version is $187http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInforma...">http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/Pro...ion/0,,3...
aldamon - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
Get a better mobo AT and you'll see what the E6300 can really do. The $150 Gigabyte DS3 goes well over 400 FSB with the right RAM.goinginstyle - Thursday, July 27, 2006 - link
His motherboard is fine, using stock cooling is what limited the overclocks.rjm55 - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
It's been interesting to watch as AT has paid more and more attention to overclocking. Fortunately for me, the overclocking on good air cooling has been a perfect match for what I'm looking for. I just checked and the monster Tuniq cooler we saw in the Conroe launch sells for just $49. People using it say it is silent because of the huge fan that turns slow inside the core. The point is I can likely go even further with the Tuniq than Anand found here - which was impressive enough.Now that we see the headroom on even the cheapest Conroe CPUs it is hard to understnad why anyone can consider an AM2 for anything but the low-end. Until Am2 drops to 65nm the Conroe OC blows away anything I can do with my AM2 chip.
Thanks for showing us what great overclockers Conroe is turning out to be! The E6600 with 4MB cache for $312 is looking mighty sweet for me. If I remeber you got yours to 4GHz.