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 F.E.A.R. & Rise of Legends
Our F.E.A.R. test should be fairly familiar by now, as it is the built in performance test included with the game. Computer settings were left at "Maximum" while the graphics settings were set to "High" with the resolution cranked up to 1600 x 1200. F.E.A.R. ends up still being more GPU than CPU bound at these settings, even with a pair of X1900 XTs at its disposal, but we do see some separation among the processors:
We mentioned that F.E.A.R. is more GPU limited than many other titles, but without antialiasing enabled the spread is still 42%. As with many other games, the Core 2 Duo chips outperformed their AMD counterparts in terms of price/performance. However, it's questionable how many people would purchase a $200 CPU to pair up with over $1200 worth of motherboard and graphics cards. That doesn't mean the Core 2 Duo isn't faster, but you will certainly need a very powerful graphics chip in order to realize the potential. On the flip side, the extremely strong performance of an overclocked E6300/E6400 means you can spent more money on your graphics setup if you're a gamer and get close enough to the speed of a X6800 through overclocking to drive those high end GPUs.
Rise of Legends is a newcomer to our game benchmark suite and what an excellent addition it is. This Real Time Strategy game looks very good and plays well too; it serves as good filler until the next Command & Conquer title eventually arrives for those looking for an RTS fix. We ran with the resolution set to 1600 x 1200 and the graphics settings set to the medium defaults. We recorded a custom demo of a 3 vs. 2 multiplayer battle and played it back at 4x speed, recording the average frame rate for 10 minutes of the battle. The 10 minutes we focused on contained a good mix of light skirmishes between opponents, base/resource management with very few characters on the screen and of course some very large scale battles. As with most RTSes, Rise of Legends is extremely CPU bound. The performance variability between runs was fairly high in this test, mainly because of how disk intensive the playback can get. Differences in performance of up to 5% should be ignored.
Rise of Legends is clearly a game that demands a lot from the processor, and the additional cache in the 4MB Core 2 Duo chips also appears to have more of an impact in this game than in other games. The only Core 2 chip that AMD's FX-62 is able to beat is the "budget" E6300. If other RTS games perform similarly, strategy gamers will definitely want to upgrade to Core 2. Once again we see that overclocking the E6300 and E6400 get you fairly close to the higher end E6700 and X6800 Core 2 processors; with performance like this, why bother spending any more on a faster Core 2 CPU?
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mkruer - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
Interesting enough once you go to 1600x1200 with all the bells and whistles on, the CPU is the least of your worries. Even the AMD Athlon 64 x2 3800+ performs with in 10% of the highest Conroe. LOLcgrecu77 - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
sadly anandtech looks like its following on tom hardware's path of intel biased reviews. Sure, the bias IS NOT blatant, but still.Obviously conroe is faster than amd (by ~20%) and overclocking proves nothing, both athlon and conroe have about the same room for overclocking and probably the performance difference will remain the same.
The fact is that cost/performance definitely is on the amd side right now as the X2-3800 +mb + ram is probably more than 20% cheaper than the core and offers almost the same performance in games (most people care about that, I know I only look at gaming bechmarks). Not to mention that after going the dual core route I would definitely recommend people to NOT buy a dual core now, but stick with a single core 3700+ (or 3800 if the 3700 cannot be find anymore). For ~100$ with minimal overclocking and KEEPING your mb AND memory you will get similar performance in games (unless you ACTUALLY play at 800x600) with a much more expensive system from intel/amd. It only makes sense to buy conroe if you're going high end and you want the maximum performance you can get.
Dual core is NOT worth it on a home computer. Anybody that says differently haa no clue.
OcHungry - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
I don’t get this review? is it about just overclocking conroe or is it about which platform gives you better price/performance?If it is about overclocking conroe, then why are there AMD CPU's listed?
and why aren’t AMD's overclocked?
If it is about overclocking and price performance, then why aren’t AMD's overclocked and why aint we considering the motherboards?
Today you can buy a good "SLI" AM2 motherboard for less than $150 and A64 3800 x2 for $155 and overclock the hell of it. I have seen up to 3ghz easy.
you can buy 2 cheap SLI cards ($85 each) and build a hell of a system.
That is $450 for CPU+mobo+2SLI cards.
Can E6300/6400 do that? NO. For one, you have to buy a $250 motherboard hoping Nvedia will release SLI drivers to Intel.
I am very disappointed at Mr. Anand and this whole outfit.
Mr. Anand, you know, there are AMD users that will question the merit and integrity of this article. Why are you doing this? why didn’t you show any AMD's overclocked? And why aren’t you giving the readers the total package? If it’s about overclocking low end conroe alone, the what are AMD’s doing there? And not overclocked? Is this article for stupid readers?
I mean, I am not trying to offend reader’s intelligence, but this article sure does.
Are you and AMD in some kind of friction? it sure seems that way?
goinginstyle - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
Dear OC-Sharikou,I noticed you have moved on without answering our objective points on the memory article. Let's recap, you were fired from Intel with cause, you are bitter because of it, and will take any opportunity to slam any positive results from Intel. You have an issue with Anand that you have never explained but it is obvious you are extremely jealous or maybe you have a crush on him and was upset he married someone else.
Did you read the title and text? Do you have the ability to read 12 pages of written text or do the pretty graphs throw you off?
Please get up on your mother's lap and have her read you the story again. This time pay attention and put your bottle down.
See the above statement. Even if you overclocked the AMD cpu's and placed them on the space shuttle for launch they are not going to approach Conroe when overclocked also. Get over it, dude.
Good point, in a month or so you will be able to do the same with Conroe. The problem once again with your statement is that you have seen these overclocks. Since you do not actually own these processors then you have no idea what the hell you are spewing. Look in your diaper, that is the same crap you are spreading around here.
If you knew how to read, then you would know nvidia is launching Intel SLI boards under a $100 next month.
I am a AMD user and I am ashamed of your comments. Read through Anand's previous AMD and P4 articles and you will understand how fair this site is unlike others. If he shows the AMD CPUs overclocked and they still do not perform as well as Conroe then what type of bulls&$! are you going to post. You already tried calculations yesterday that blew up in your face. You are consistent, consistently WRONG.
How much does AMD pay you for your daily trash blog and to post this crap at AnandTech?
In conclusion-
Conroe owns AM2 - Get over It!
jjunos - Thursday, July 27, 2006 - link
LOL!!lol sorry, that was a great response!! haha
I have to agree with the above poster....while I guess I'm a bit pro AMD, what I cant' stand is amd freaks bashing anand for his reviews. Do all you amd freaks really think that when K8L comes out, that he won't do just as many indepth reviews of that?
Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
As I stated in the review, the only AM2 CPUs (non EE/EE SFF, those will be looked at in a later article) we have on hand are a X2 5000+ and a FX-62. Overclocking either one of those is not representative of how a X2 3800+ overclocks, so it doesn't make sense to include those numbers as we're talking about overclocking on the low end. As I also mentioned in the review, most people are able to reach anywhere between 2.4 and 2.8GHz with their X2 3800+ CPUs without much effort, which we already happen to have numbers for in the review. What we didn't know prior to today was how the 2MB cache Conroes performed at higher clock speeds, this was the point of today's article.As far as your concerns about budget go, our article agrees with your point on motherboard cost. From the conclusion:
"There are two potential concerns with building a budget Core 2 Duo system. The first is availability, and hopefully we will have a clear answer on that subject in the near future. The other is motherboard cost. The ASUS P5W-DH we used in this article is currently the best overclocking motherboard we've seen for the socket 775 platform, but at $250 it is anything but cheap. We have seen quite a few of the P965 motherboards that can also overclock the budget Core 2 chips to reasonable levels, with prices hovering much closer to $140. Unfortunately, none of those boards can support SLI or CrossFire at present."
As far as I can tell, all of your issues were addressed in the review itself. Let me know if there's something I missed.
Take care,
Anand
jjunos - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
*sigh*Seriously guys. They already state this.
True, I would have loved to have seen them have an overclocked 3800 directly for comparison, but really, I've seen all the articles I need to see on overclocking X2's. I don't think the point was to show AMD in a bad light, they were showing how the intels overclock. Looks good, but the AMD are just too cheap now to say no! :D
JarredWalton - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
For the record, our OC results for E6300/E6400 are *very* conservative. Stock cooling means you should easily reach these results, and anyone that spends $30-$50 on an aftermarket cooler can surpass them without batting an eye. On AM2, it's all about core clock, with maybe a 5% difference from HTT/RAM settings. 2.6 GHz with a 3800+ is reasonable (though a bit iffy with stock HSF), so you can get 5000+ performance (which is shown). Throwing in better cooling *might* get 2.8 GHz, but even that is questionable without watercooling or phase. FX-62 on air can probably get 3.0-3.2 GHz, which is still going to be slower in most cases than E6300 OC.That said, X2 with less expensive motherboards is still viable, and I will be buying a couple chips for systems in the near future. If you have motherboards that support X2, it's even more attractive. Going from 939 3000+ to 939 4200+ for $189 is a tremendous upgrade, and you can OC to about 2.6-2.8 GHz. Is that *competitive*? Absolutely! Is it faster than what you can get with Core 2 if you're buying a new motherboard, RAM, and CPU? Nope, but then for many people it doesn't have to be. From page 6:
Take care,
Jarred Walton
bere - Wednesday, August 2, 2006 - link
The 5000+ that U have there is a FSB200. U compare a FSB 200 with 370 FSB.jjunos - Wednesday, July 26, 2006 - link
Since apparently you're opinion defines the world, what exactly is dual core good for?Really, this amd fanboi crap has seriously gotten out of hand lately. I love amd. But the FUD that you guys have been spewing lately is just garbage. In games, the fastest cpu wins, true, but that won't be the case in the future (and even now there are games that take advantage of dual core). In normal usage? Hell yes does dual core matter! The biggest upgraded I've seen in the last 10 years on my home box was when I went from 1cpu to dual cpu.
From day to day usage, other users on my computer, everything. I love it.
Actually, when I started a new job and they only offered me a 1 cpu box, it killed me.
Once you go dual core, you can't go back!