Testbed and Methods
We want to compare the Core 2 Duo E4300 with its closest market rivals. If you look up in today's price-lists, you will find that you can buy another Intel processor for the same sum of about $163. It is Pentium D 945. The Core 2 Duo E6300 model is a little more expensive. As for AMD's offers, this sum of money can buy you an Athlon 64 X2 4200+ which has become cheaper than its official recommended price. So, these four CPUs are going to perform before us today. Besides that, we will also benchmark our Core 2 Duo E4300 when overclocked to 3.42GHz by increasing the FSB frequency to 380MHz (the memory works in DDR2-760 mode in this case). We'll also include the results of the Core 2 Extreme X6800 into the diagrams to compare them with those of the overclocked Core 2 Duo E4300.
We used the following hardware for our tests:
- Processors:
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ (Socket AM2, 2.2GHz, 2x512KB L2 cache)
- Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 (LGA775, 1.8GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2MB L2 cache)
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (LGA775, 1.86GHz, 1067MHz FSB, 2MB L2 cache)
- Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 (LGA775, 2.93GHz, 1067MHz FSB, 4MB L2 cache)
- Intel Pentium D 945 (LGA775, 3.4GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2x2MB L2 cache)
- Mainboards:
- ASUS P5B Deluxe (LGA775, Intel P965 Express)
- ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (Socket AM2, NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI)
- Memory: 2048MB DDR2-800 SDRAM (Mushkin XP2-6400PRO, 2x1024MB, DDR2-800, 4-4-4-12-1T)
- Graphics card: PowerColor X1900 XTX 512MB (PCI Express x16)
- Disk subsystem: Maxtor MaXLine III 250GB (Serial ATA-150)
- Operating system: Microsoft Windows XP SP2 with DirectX 9.0c
We selected the highest-performance settings in the mainboards' BIOS Setup.
