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Introduction

Intel has been riding a wave of only good vibes regarding its Core 2 Duo processors since they were launched over a month ago. With availability now begining to catch up with the hype, we're going to be taking a practical look at the performance of the Core 2 chips that most people will be affording.

While the E6600 and E6700 "Conroe" (not to mention the X6800) are absolutely fantastic performers and do come with 2MB of cache more than the two chips we're looking at today, the E6300 and E6400 are going to be what find their way into the systems of most budget conscious enthusiasts and mainstream Dell and HP buyers. Overclockers will also have good reason to take a solid look at these chips as well assuming the situation is similar to what we experienced with our E6700.

The E6300 sits at the bottom of Intel's Desktop Core 2 lineup and despite being a brand new chip, can be had for less than $200 from major online retailers. It's clocked at 1.86 GHz, just over 2GHz less than the 2.16 GHz E6400 which can be had for under $250. As brand new chips, these prices are incredible and will doubtless make these CPU's the subject of high demand for quite some time.

For the purposes of this article, we have taken our single E6400 and lowered the multiplier to 7x (versus the 8x stock of the E6400) to simulate the performance of an E6300. Both chips have identical cache sizes meaning that the only comparison we can't make is how an E6300 overclocks compared to an E6400. We will cover overclocking and extreme performance value in more detail on the last page, but in the meantime, keep reading to see the performance of these chips out of the box.