Verdict: Can the cheapest Core 2 Duo put up a good fight?
The Core 2 X6800 Extreme Edition sits at the top of Intel's CPU range with the authority of a kung fu master, and it has the performance to earn this level of respect. With a price tag of £625, though, you'd have to be as dedicated to your hardware as a Shaolin monk is to his temple to actually buy one.
In the world of martial arts there aren't any shortcuts to attaining greatness, as anyone who has watched 'The Karate Kid' will know. Thankfully, though, in the world of overclocking, you can turn a budget-friendly, wandering peasant of a CPU into a revered sensei in a matter of minutes.
With AMD's eminently overclockable 3800+ X2 CPU now priced at a generous £100, the overclockability of Intel's E6300 Core 2 Duo CPU, priced at £130, will be the deciding factor for most enthusiasts over whether to join the Intel dojo.
The E6300 is the cheapest Core 2 Duo out there. It's a dual-core CPU, and clocked at a lowly 1.86GHz. To further undermine its ego, it's based on the more budget-friendly Allendale core rather than being a fully-fledged Conroe core-based Core 2 Duo. This means that the E6300 has only 2MB of Level 2 cache shared between both cores, as opposed to the 4MB found on higher-end chips.
The multiplier of the E6300 is 7x, with a stock FSB of 266MHz (1,066MHz effective). When not under load, though, the multiplier will automatically drop to 6x in order to minimise power usage. With this in mind, it's pleasantly surprising that the E6300 still manages to outperform the Athlon 64 X2 3800+ X2 out of the box. The efficiency of the Intel Core architecture continues to impress us; even with a modest sub-2GHz clock speed, the E6300 quickly completed our benchmarks.
Our E6300 test system was almost 10 per cent faster than our X2 3800+ system at stock speeds. The Core architecture is particularly suited to DVD encoding, with the Intel PC completing this test almost a minute ahead of the AMD system. In the Paint Shop Pro image editing test, the Core 2 system was faster too, although both systems achieved the same speed in the multitasking benchmark.
Overclocking has the potential to trip up the E6300 though; with its low multiplier, this chip will need high FSB speeds to achieve serious frequencies. Unfortunately for AMD, the Core 2 E6300 proved to be a fantastic overclocker, even at low voltage levels. We tested it in the Asus P5B Deluxe, and raised the FSB to 370MHz. This set the E6300 purring away at 2.59GHz, and we only had to raise the CPU voltage slightly to 1.3V for the system to complete our tests. In terms of clock speed, this is only slightly slower than the 2.66GHz E6700 CPU we use for motherboard testing, which retails at £386.
This 730MHz overclock made a massive difference to the E6300's benchmark scores. Image editing went up from 1.33 to 1.76, and DVD encoding increased from 1.15 to a massive 1.62. The overclock also had a great effect on the E6300's multitasking abilities, with the multitasking score improving from an impressive 1.49 to a brilliant 2.02. The £130 E6300's overall score of 1.80 when overclocked means that it easily outmuscles a stock Athlon 64 FX-62, which costs £550 and only manages 1.67 overall in our tests out of the box.
CONCLUSION
While it's slightly more expensive than the Athlon 64 X2 3800+, the E6300 more than makes up for this with its superior performance both at stock speeds and when overclocked.
As we found in this month's RAM Labs test, the efficiency of Core 2 Duo's shared Level 2 cache means that you can get by with cheaper, high-latency RAM, negating the financial advantage of buying a slightly cheaper AMD CPU. Opting for an LGA775 system over a Socket AM2 setup means that you'll also have an upgrade path to the imperious X6800 Extreme Edition, rather than being limited by an overpriced and underperforming Athlon 64 FX-62. Whether you're building a dream PC, or a budget-friendly, ninja overclocking rig, Core 2 Duo is the way to go.
