Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E6600 Preview (Mainstream Price for Performance Enthusiast)

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Article: Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E6600 Preview (Mainstream Price for Performance Enthusiast)

Target Audience: E
(N=Newbie, E=Hardware Enthusiast, O=Overclocker, B=Budget)

IV. Stock Benchmarking

Stock Settings
For benchmarking, I will first run the system on stock settings. The stock settings will serve as the baseline for comparison for the overclock score.

Note that all settings here are on automatic, with the RAM frequency running in sync with CPU system bus. With the advent of this new processor, the minimum speed of RAM to be used must be a DDR2-533MHz.

For the stock settings, all benchmark results will be acquired from three(3) runs, removing the highest and lowest score, but not averaging the total score of the three. This limit the number of random peaks of scores, and hopes to reduce the number of random unusual results. There will be no online submission of score because of time constraint and software limitation.

Temperature at idle hovers at 44C, while shoots to as high as 56c. Unless extreme overclocking is desired, the stock cooler will be more than to cool this baby. The motherboard is also known to read the temperature about 15c to 20c higher than comparable 3rd party motherboards.

::Multimedia Rendering::

Cinebench 9.5 (Click on the image for full version)

::Subsystem Test::

SuperPi 1M (Click on the image for full version)

PCMark02

PCMark05

Sandra-CPU (Click on the image for full version)

Sandra-Multimedia (Click on the image for full version)

Sandra-RAM Bandwidth (Click on the image for full version)


::3D Test::

3DMark03

3DMark05

3DMark06


::Gaming::

Doom3 640x480 (Click on the image for full version)

The results are all fantastic, considering this isn't even the top end processor. PCMark02 very high, rivaling previous generation Intel desktop processors, showing that shared cache is excellent. In comparison, an Intel Pentium D 920 (2.8GHz) scores a 6100 to 6300 PCMark02, and yet this new processor at a lesser clock speed scores at a whooping 9000+ PCMark02! Memory performance is unthinkable, easily breaking 30,000 points.

PCMark05 is where it reallys shows the muscle power, getting high marks, beating a lot of 500, 600, 800, and 900 series processors on stock settings alone. Gaming scores on 3DMark03 and 3DMark05 all shows consistent outstanding scores reflecting a huge portion of CPU muscle on the result. The score is almost unbelievable, Intel is not "bragging without thinking" when they say they are going to be releasing a CPU faster than the competition. Doom3 score is also the fastest I've seen to date, with such video card and CPU speed.

Cinebench is another wonder, video buff and multimedia fanatics will be rejoicing for such an unbelievable performance. If the dawn of dual core during its early incarnation is a blessing, the new uA is a big miracle. Truly worthy of all the praises, this CPU rocks big time.

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