Testbed and Methods
Besides the investigation of the L2 cache size effect on the performance of dual-core processors on Core micro-architecture, we would also like to check out the performance of the new Pentium E2000 solutions compared with that of their competitors. The official prices for the new Pentium E2160 and Pentium E2140 have been set at $84 and $74 respectively. The previous generation processors, Pentium D 935 and Pentium D 925 on NetBurst micro- architecture, cost about the same these days. Moreover, you can also buy AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ and 3600+ for about the same price. These six budget dual-core solutions offered for less than $100 a piece will be the main heroes of our today抯 test session.
As a result, we used the following hardware to build our test platform this time:
- CPUs:
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (Socket AM2, 2.0GHz, 2x512KB L2, Windsor);
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ (Socket AM2, 1.9GHz, 2x512KB L2, Brisabane);
- Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 (LGA775, 1.8GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2MB L2, Allendale);
- Intel Pentium D 935 (LGA775, 3.2GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2x2MB L2, Presler);
- Intel Pentium D 925 (LGA775, 3.0GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2x2MB L2, Presler);
- Intel Pentium E2160 (LGA775, 1.8GHz, 800MHz FSB, 1MB L2, Conroe-1M);
- Intel Pentium E2160 (LGA775, 1.6GHz, 800MHz FSB, 1MB L2, Conroe-1M).
- Mainboards:
- ASUS M2N32-SLI Deluxe (Socket AM2, NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI);
- ASUS P5K Deluxe (LGA775, Intel P35);
- Memory: 2048MB DDR2-800 SDRAM (Mushkin XP2-6400PRO, 2 x 1024 MB, DDR2-800, 4-4-4-12);
- Graphics card: PowerColor X1900 XTX 512MB;
- HDD: Western Digital WD1500AHFD;
- OS: Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate x86.
The tests were performed with mainboards?BIOS Setup parameters adjusted for maximum performance.
