Intel Core 2 Duo E4300: Affordable and Highly Overclockable
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 10, 2007 2:45 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
General Performance
Overall system performance, measured using SYSMark 2004SE, places the default clocked E4300 at within 4% of the performance of the E6300. Obviously the release of the E6320 will widen this gap but E6300-level performance is nothing to balk at, given the price point of this chip what we're looking at is nothing short of stellar.
Overclocked, the E4300 truly shines - outpacing the X6800 by a marginal 3.3%. The margin of victory is well within the variance for SYSMark but the point to take home is that we're looking at an overclocked $163 chip, delivering performance equal to a CPU priced at six times its cost.
Internet Content Creation performance reflects what we saw in the overall score - the E4300 is within striking distance of the E6300, and of course faster than AMD's Athlon 64 X2 3800+. When overclocked, the E4300 can give you better performance than a X6800, this time coming in 11% faster.
The Office Productivity suite changes things a bit; while the E4300 continues to perform similarly to the E6300, when overclocked it's still slower than the X6800 despite the clock speed advantage. There are many applications and usage models that will end up favoring more cache over a higher clock speed, and that's where the E4300 will lose out to its more expensive alternatives. At the end of the day, it's still a great value, but keep in mind that the smaller cache will limit maximum performance in some areas.
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clairvoyant129 - Friday, January 12, 2007 - link
Look again, the E4300 frags the X2 4200+bob4432 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
i just need to keep on saying to myself, i don't need to upgrade, i don't need to upgrade, i don't need to upgrade.......man, what a good time for people that are builing though, intel sure is putting as much of the smackdown on amd (currently running amd so i am not partial to either, just my wallet) as they can.
when this thing drops to $133, it will be so tempting....hoping ddr2 will drop soon!!!!!
kmmatney - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
How far can you overclock the 4300 with a DDR motherboard, so I can use the 2GB I already have? With the ASRock 775Dual-VSTA LGA 775, which usually can get to 312 MhZ FSB, you should be able to get to 2.8 Ghz, which isn't too bad. Are there any better options out there that allow you to use DDR?dm - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
http://fanboyreview.blogspot.com/2006/12/brag-one-...">http://fanboyreview.blogspot.com/2006/1...one-hund...Invader57 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
I believe this article has the prices wrong. According to the recent Intel news release, the E4300 price will be reduced to $113 in Q2, when the E4400 is released at $133.atenza - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
Well, you're right! There's a mistake in the article.docmilo - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
I bought a cheap mb/cpu combo to get into dual core some time ago. I currently am running an 805 Pentium D in an ECS board, RC410L/800-M. I run great overclocked to 3.4 ghz from stock 2.66. This chip is only at 533 fsb. CPU-Z shows the fsb at 1500 to get this speed. I think this testing should have been done on a mb with a max 800fsb since I believe this chip is for that type of mb.What kind of OC should I expect on an 800mhz fsb motherboard?
atenza - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
Your mobo doesn't support Core 2 at all. Some improved voltage regulator is needed, having socket 775 is not enough.GeekUSA - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
Does anyone know where I can get the program that overclocks these beautiful chips?Thank You.
Toebot - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
http://www.cpuid.com/clockgen.php">null