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Overclocking

The E6750 is the best Core 2 Duo for overclocking that I've had the pleasure to work with to date. Yes, that is a very strong statement – but it is quite true.

The maximum stable processor speed we reached during testing was a whopping 3.8GHz – and this was with air cooling!

In order to reach 3.8GHz, we took the following simple steps:

• used the excellent Noctua NH-U 12 CPU cooler with two 12cm fans in a push-pull configuration
• used Corsair PC2-8888 DDR2 modules at 950MHz with 4-4-4-12/2T timings
• set the FSB to 475MHz
• set Vcore to 1.393V
• set Vram to 2.4V
• set V MCH to +0.1V
• set V FSB to +0.1V

It was pretty amazing to see the chip run through all of our test suite with 100% stability at this clock speed.

Initially it looked like the system would be stable at even higher speeds – I was able to boot into Windows and do some simple operations at slightly over 4GHz – however the heat generated by the processor at that speed caused thermal shutdown when running any heavy computation oriented benchmarks. So, being an honest benchmarker, I cannot call it a stable overclock. I am quite confident though that with more extreme cooling solutions (chilled H2O, phase change, the South Pole) it would be possible to stabilize the E6750 at 4GHz – or even possibly 4.1GHz.

For those of you who may be interested, the highest FSB that I was able to run the processor and motherboard at with 100% stability was 2028MHz (4x507MHz), with a 7x multiplier for a CPU speed of 3.549GHz strapped to 4-4-4-12/2T memory timings; and the memory performance at that speed was higher than at the 3.8GHz setting. However, all non-memory benchmarks performed noticeably better at the 475x8 setting.

Power Consumption

We were curious how much juice the E6750 needed, so we measured the power draw using our "KILL A WATT P3" watt meter to measure the power consumed by the computer (not including the monitor) while idling on the Windows desktop and while 100% loading both cores (we tried both Pov-Ray SSE2 version, multi-processor run, and running two copies of CPUBurn with error checking off - both gave identical results).

At stock speeds:

• Idle power draw: 100W
• Heavy load power draw: 132W

Overclocked to 3.8GHz:

• Idle power draw: 107W
• Heavy load power draw: 157W

Very impressive performance if you ask me...

Conclusion

If I haven't made myself clear enough already, the Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 is simply the best overclocking Core 2 Duo chip I've had the pleasure of testing to date.

It overclocked very easily, at low Vcore settings, and was able to achieve 2028MHz FSB – well above the 1333MHz FSB it is designed for. The best performance however was obtained at a "mere" 1900MHz FSB, where I was able to get the processor stable at 3.8GHz, which is my personal record for an air cooled Core 2 processor.

As you saw from the benchmarks, the high FSB speeds allow greater utilization of the high memory bandwidth offered by dual channel high speed DDR2 modules. However, the reality is that until Intel starts shipping Nehalem processors with integrated memory controllers, processors will not be able to take advantage of the massive memory potential of high speed DDR2 modules. This is due to simply not being able to transfer as much data across the FSB as the memory is capable of providing. The same is true of DDR3 memory and their 1333MHz bandwidth.

Currently, games make limited use of multiple cores, and the few games that offer multi-core support take a simplified, limited approach that rarely shows any gain past two cores performance standings.

For gamers, a high core speed highly overclockable chip like the E6750 makes far more sense than the more expensive, less overclockable quad core processors, simply due to the higher core speeds that the dual core chips can reach . Mind you, this situation will not last, and it is only a matter of a year or two before games can utilize more than two cores far more optimally.

And the price point of $200 USD make it quite the deal.

I think we all know who Intels' target audience is for the Core 2 Duo E6750. This chip is made for gamers!