Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 Preview: The Desktop Gets a 1333MHz FSB
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 25, 2007 2:57 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Gaming Performance
We're testing with a handful of new titles in today's review, many of which are far from CPU bound even at relatively low (by today's standards) resolutions. For our S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Supreme Commander tests we had to reduce the in-game resolution to 1024 x 768, while Rainbow Six: Vegas and Lost Planet both required 800 x 600 in order to produce measurable differences between these CPUs.
On the one hand, this is good news for those looking to build gaming PCs on lower end processors. On the other hand, it means that we have to test with less real world settings in our CPU reviews to accurately compare overall gaming performance of modern day CPUs. The CPU/GPU boundry pendulum will continuously swing from one end to the other, we're simply at a point today where even the almighty GeForce 8800 GTX can't run everything perfectly smoothly at 1600 x 1200.
As CPUs and GPUs converge, games will undoubtedly become even more compute bound, but it's difficult to predict what effect this will have (if any) on the balance between sequential and highly parallel general purpose processing.
Our first 3D game test is our walkthrough of Bruma in the popular RPG Oblivion. This test was run at 1600 x 1200 with Very High quality defaults selected from Oblivion's launcher. FRAPS was used in this benchmark:
Oblivion was one of the two benchmarks that showed a significant performance improvement due to the faster 1333MHz FSB. Looking at the E6420 vs. 5600+ comparison, AMD actually pulls ahead here thanks to its aggressive pricing.
We ran Half Life 2: Episode One at 1600 x 1200, with all settings at their maximum values with the exception of AA/anisotropic filtering, which we left disabled.
A small improvement for the 1333MHz FSB, and AMD continues to win the performance battle at ~$180.
We ran Prey at 1600 x 1200 with High Quality textures, all detail settings were set to their highest options, no AA, and 8X aniso:
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was tested at 1024 x 768 with full dynamic lighting enabled and high quality detail settings:
We ran Supreme Commander at 1024 x 768 with medium quality presets. We ran a subset of the built in performance test, specifically we only used the third performance test in the script as it was the most CPU bound.
Rainbow Six: Vegas proved to be particularly GPU bound, even at 800 x 600. We left most detail options enabled/high, with the exception of the eye effect setting.
Capcom's Lost Planet demo is available in both DX9 and DX10 flavors, but for this review we used the DX9 version given that we've not been able to find any real benefit to running the DX10 version. Just like RS:V, we had to run Lost Planet at 800 x 600 with a mixture of high/medium quality settings:
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yacoub - Monday, June 25, 2007 - link
Cool, so basically my E4400 oc'd to 3.0GHz @ 1333MHz fsb is essentially an E6850 with half the L2 cache (2MB vs 4MB). For only $135 it's giving me quite the bang-for-the-buck. :DJmsAndrsn - Monday, June 25, 2007 - link
Cool, so basically my E4400 oc'd to 3.0GHz @ 1333MHz fsb is essentially an E6850 with half the L2 cache (2MB vs 4MB). For only $135 it's giving me quite the bang-for-the-buck. :DActually, an E4400 overclocked to 1333 FSB would be at 3.33GHz. An E4300 @ 1333 FSB would be 3.0GHz
yacoub - Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - link
sorry, forgot to mention i dropped the multiplier to 9x. =)Not enough heatsink to cool 3.3Ghz to a temp i was satisfied with.
tim75 - Monday, June 25, 2007 - link
Slightly off topic, but since the 1333 FSB has 10.6 GB/s bandwidth (1333 x 64bit) I can use DDR-667 in dual channel mode(also 10.6 GB/s[667 x 128 bit]) without any performance hit right?bamacre - Monday, June 25, 2007 - link
Yup. At stock speeds you'll only need 667mhz DDR2 for the 1333mhz FSB C2D's. And of course 533mhz DDR2 for 1066mhz C2D's.gigahertz20 - Monday, June 25, 2007 - link
Gary Key,I've been waiting for your promised P35 roundup article you mentioned in your May 30th "Gigabyte GA-P35T-DQ6: DDR3 comes a knocking, again" article. Any word on what day this week it will be posted? I'm eagerly waiting the release of the article so I finally buy my long awaited Core 2 Duo setup, I just need a solid motherboard to go with it.
yacoub - Monday, June 25, 2007 - link
If you give up waiting, go for the MSi P6N-SLI Platinum. Awesome 650i-SLI board. She's rock solid for me @ 1333MHz fsb, only voltage increase is on the vcore, and I'm running 4GB dual-channel paired in the four DIMM slots. Fast and stable, just as I'd wanted.gigahertz20 - Monday, June 25, 2007 - link
Is the article on time to be published this week?Deusfaux - Monday, June 25, 2007 - link
I assume your comparisons of the 2 FSBs are keeping end clock speed the same?sc3252 - Monday, June 25, 2007 - link
Why don't your new articles have tests where you run multiple applications at the same time, I really enjoyed reading older articles how the cpu's stood up to multitasking. Its nice that we have benchmarks showing how much faster the new cpu's are, but I don't think it shows how we will really be using the computer.For example I will be using my computer much different then say playing one game strictly. When I play world of warcraft I will usually have itunes open playing a song, and Firefox open looking up where to turn in my next quest. It would be nice if in future articles you could create a benchmark doing some of those things.