Intel Core 2 Duo E6750

Verdict: At £116, it's almost too good to be true

The P35 chipset has been out for over a month, but it’s only now that we can officially tell you about Intel’s brand-new 333MHz FSB (1,333MHz effective) Core 2 Duo CPUs. To distinguish these new chips from their 266MHz FSB (1,066MHz effective) forebears, Intel has added a ‘50’ to the model number.

The first of these new chips is the E6750, which, despite its higher FSB, runs at the same 2.66GHz frequency as the existing E6700. Like the E6700,the E6750 has two cores, each sharing a 4MB Level 2 cache. Despite the increased FSB, and therefore theoretically higher memory bandwidth, the E6750 performs almost identically to the E6700 in our benchmarks at stock speeds. As Intel hasn’t made any other enhancements, both chips achieved an overall score of 1.84.

However, this isn’t all that surprising, since we’ve always known that Core 2 Duo CPUs aren’t limited by memory bandwidth, unlike their more bandwidth-hungry quad-core cousins. With a VID of 1.3V, the E6750 proved to be very easy to overclock; by raising its vcore to 1.525V, we managed to increase its FSB to 458MHz, boosting its frequency from 2.66GHz to 3.66GHz. Clearly, the latest Intel chips (as with all Core 2 Duos) have plenty of overclocking headroom.

CONCLUSION

While the E6750 isn’t any faster than the E6700, thanks to the price war between Intel and AMD, it’s much cheaper. In fact, the Intel list price is the same as that of the 2.13GHz E6420, so the E6750 is more than 40 per cent cheaper than an E6700. As such, the E6750 is simply stunning value for money.

Test kit: Asus P5K3 Deluxe WiFi-AP, 250GB Samsung SpinPoint P120S
hard disk, 2GB of A-Data DDR3, GeForce 7900 GTX, Windows XP SP2

Intel Core2 Duo E6750 2.6GHz Soket 775 1333MHz bu

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