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
Gaming Performance using Oblivion
We'll close out our gaming performing analysis with Oblivion. We ran at a setting that more or less corresponds to "medium quality", without antialiasing. This game is demanding of both CPUs and GPUs, though if you have to choose just one we would still recommend a faster GPU over a faster CPU. Remember, we are using arguably the fastest GPU setup for running Oblivion; if you're only running a single GPU, your average frame rates will be far lower. That said, let's take a look at performance:
The additional L2 cache doesn't seem to matter as much in Oblivion, but faster processor speeds definitely help out. The performance spread is 67% in the town portion of the benchmark, but only 51% in the dungeons. This likely has a lot to do with the number of creatures present in most towns, as there are far more AI calculations to perform.
The patterns we've seen in other games and applications continue here, and with some overclocking both of the slowest Core 2 processors are essentially out of reach of the fastest AM2 offerings. It will almost certainly take more than a die shrink and faster clock speeds for AMD to close the gap. Those of you who are interested in purchasing a high-performance CPU and keeping it for a while while you upgrade your graphics cards will definitely not be displeased with what you can get from Intel's Core 2 lineup.
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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.