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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getbush - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
There is a for that should be four and you start the oblivion page with will instead of we'll.JarredWalton - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
Thanks - I gave the document a final proofing now that I'm a bit more coherent and squashed several more "typos" (speech-recognition-os?) I helped Anand fill in a bunch of the text, but it was late and my eyes weren't cooperating. LOLyacoub - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
What I see here is that the E6400 is easily the way to go for folks who aren't interested in overclocking but want the best bang-for-the-buck.For very little more $$ than the E6300, you get a chip that rides quite a bit higher up on the charts in many tests.
Now the question: What affordable motherboard is recommended for stable, reliable non-overclocked C2D Conroe performance? Perhaps the Intel P965 board?
There's no reason to drop $200-250 for a motherboard when you aren't going to utilize its overclocking functionality. I believe that opens up the user to the more affordable P965 boards, right? They tend to be more around $150 and if it's made by Intel it should be plenty stable, right?
Also most boards now are passively-cooled which is excellent since the dinky fans on older motherboards were always noisy and died quickly. Avoiding those is another benefit as I believe the Intel P965 board is passively cooled as well.
Thoughts?
anandtechrocks - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
Check out the Gigabyte DS3. It uses the P965 chipset and costs ~$144. It overclocks just as well as the $250 Asus motherboard in this article and it uses very high quality solid capacitors. Only drawback is that no SLI or Crossfire.yacoub - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
I don't know, looks like there's some cause for concern about currently available 965 boards now...http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid...">http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...amp;thre...
anandtechrocks - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
Very good article, I really enjoyed it. I think there is an error on page 4, on the 3rd graph from the bottom. The E6300 and E6400 bars are miss-labled.JarredWalton - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
Fixed - thanks.code65536 - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
How do the OC'ed chips do with power consumption. Does a 6400 @ 2.88 use more or less power than a 6800, for example?supremelaw - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
... and heat.I assume that the stock Intel HSF hasn't changed:
http://www.supremelaw.org/systems/heatsinks/warnin...">http://www.supremelaw.org/systems/heatsinks/warnin...
and that a superior HSF with proper backing plate
is still recommended for Conroe CPUs, even though
they run cooler in general.
Sincerely yours,
/s/ Paul Andrew Mitchell
Webmaster, Supreme Law Library
http://www.supremelaw.org/">http://www.supremelaw.org/
houe - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
fp