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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
68 Comments
View All Comments
najames - Thursday, January 11, 2007 - link
It would be nice if they would include 64bit benchmarks, even nicer would be 64bit Linux benchmarks since I am not paying $300-400 for Vi$ta.mlambert890 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2...">http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2...Core 2 performs a few fetch and decode tricks in IA32 that it cant perform in EM64T. People seem to be overdramatizing the presumed effect that these tricks (or lack thereof) would have on 64bit performance. Ive done a lot of testing with C2 in various forms on XP, 2k3 and Vista x64 and have seen no defficiency with real world performance of C2 EM64T. I'm confident that benchmarks will prove this out.
Accord99 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
If you're not into overclocking, there are numerous cheap C2D motherboards and unlike the A64, you don't need fast memory. Unlike the A64 which requires DDR2-800 just to perform like S939 DDR-400. And if you overclock, then a simple overclock gives you performance that no AMD can touch.And for Vista, the C2D will out-perform the A64 just like it outperforms the A64 in everything else.
Final Hamlet - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
Hello!Could you explain to me if Intel's energy-saving feature still works in idle situations when overclocked or does changing the FSB mean that the CPU is _always_ running at those high speeds?
Can you give me a link to a tutorial how to change FSB speed - or is it simply a matter of mainboard BIOS settings?
IntelUser2000 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
I believe EIST won't work with overclocking(someone update me), but C1E works. The lowest speed at C1E will increase proportionally to FSB speeds though.
Changing FSB speed is done by BIOS. You can do it from Windows too if your mainboard has the software for it.
Final Hamlet - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
What is more efficient regarding energy-saving?C1e or EIST?
I really would like to see documented in the article _how_ the CPU was overclocked.
mongoosesRawesome - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
search google for core 2 duo overclocking guide.keitaro - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
All I can say is... wow... just simply wow...A friend of mine is considering sticking with AMD for building a new budget system. I'll have to show her this to see if this'll change her mind. I've already suggested to her to go where the performance is. I hope she'll change her mind after looking through this quick article.
I so wish I could jump on the Core2 bandwagon right now. I'm glad that Intel is going to put 4MB on all of their 6000 series processors. This'll give me an additional incentive to look at their lowest 4MB Core2 offering. All I'd need then is a good matching motherboard and some quality DDR2 RAM.
Calin - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
This could very well be put at work in a performance microATX board. When a microATX boards review will be here?Macuser89 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
I would like to see the same benchmarks, but with the x6800 overclocked as far as it can go. with the same cooling as the e4300.