Overclocking

The Core 2 Duo E7200 provides access to new 45nm cores for less money than before. That’s why this CPU is sure to be an appealing choice for overclocking. Coming at a low price, it should have high overclockability typical of all 45nm CPUs. Added to that, the Core 2 Duo E7200 has a 266MHz FSB and, consequently, a rather high frequency multiplier, 9.5x. This multiplier is only available on the Core 2 Duo E8500, the senior model among full-featured Wolfdale CPUs. You won’t have to lift the FSB frequency too high when overclocking the new CPU and you can achieve good results on any mainboard.

We checked out the overclockability of our sample of Core 2 Duo E7200 using the above-described testbed based on an ASUS P5K3 Deluxe. The CPU was cooled with a Scythe Mugen (Infinity) air cooler.

At a voltage of 1.4V, which is quite safe for continuous use of a Wolfdale, our CPU was stable at a clock rate of 3.9GHz.

Take note that the CPUZ utility reports a core voltage of 1.344V. It’s not an error. The screenshot was taken under load (Prime95 utility), so you see the Vdroop effect here.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t conquer the 4.0GHz peak after increasing the core voltage to 1.4V (in BIOS Setup). It means that the Core 2 Duo E7200 is somewhat worse at overclocking than the Core 2 Duo E8000 which can usually speed up above 4GHz easily.

Well, we did make our Core 2 Duo E7200 stable at 4.0GHz but we had to increase the core voltage to 1.5V for that.

We have noted in our previous reviews that Wolfdale series CPUs responds with increased overclockability to an increase in the core voltage. The Core 2 Duo E7200 is not an exception. Increasing the voltage more you can achieve even higher CPU clock rates. Just don’t forget about proper cooling.

As for performance of the overclocked Core 2 Duo E7200, it is about 10% slower than the same-frequency Wolfdale with a 6MB cache in games and about 5% slower in other applications.