Author: William Henning
Editor: Howard Ha
Publish Date: Thursday, August 2nd, 2007
Originally Published on Neoseeker (http://www.neoseeker.com)
Article Link: http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/core_2_duo_e6750_review/
Copyright Neo Era Media, Inc. - please do not redistribute or use for commercial purposes.
Intel has recently introduced the P35 chipset with a fast 1333MHz FSB and DDR3 memory support – and we have found that the P35 chipset is quite an excellent performer, and when tied to speed DDR3 memory modules, it can provide high performance – albeit currently at a painfully high price.
Today, we look at one of Intel's 1333MHz FSB processors – the E6750 – which runs at 2.66GHz (333MHz x 8), and is the same as an E6700 which also runs at 2.66GHz (266MHz x 10) but with the lower 1066MHz FSB rate.
Intel was kind enough to send us an engineering sample, and we put it through its paces.
In our previous Core 2 Duo reviews (E4300, QX6700, E6600, E6300/E6400, E6700)it was very apparent that the 1066MHz (266MHz x 4) FSB was limiting the performance of the processors as it was limiting the memory and I/O bandwidth of the processor to less than 8.5GB/sec throughput. So with the new 1333MHz (333MHz x 4) FSB raising the potential bandwidth to 10.66GB/sec we expect to see the same kind of performance gain we observed earlier when we overclocked the FSB on past 1066MHz FSB chipsets and processors – the 25% increase in bandwidth was quite noticeable.
As our past DDR3 reviews/comparisons have shown us that at this time high speed DDR2 still performs better than DDR3-1333MHz modules. We decided to go with our old favorite, the Corsair XMS2-TWIN2X2048 PC-8888 (4-4-4-12/2T) and the OCZ PC2-9200 (4-4-4-12/2T) modules in order to make certian we got the best possible memory performance for the processor.
Test Setup
Hardware for testing of the Gigabyte P35-DS3R:
Benchmarks Used
Software used during testing consisted of the following:
Please note that we are showing overclocked results in all the charts - we are not holding you in suspense until the end of the article. :-) We are also presenting you with a FULL set of overclocked benchmarks - our test sytems were all stable at the settings shown with air cooling, thanks to our Noctua NH-U 12 heatsink and accompanied Noctua 120mm fans. Please take added note that the chart labels incorporate a lot of information about the test configuration. The first line shows the socket type and the model of the processor. Since all the processors shown are dual-core devices, we did not specify that on the charts.
The second line shows the "FSB/HT clock rate" x "CPU multiplier" followed by the effective DDR2 memory speed. Please note further that all of the DDR2 tests were run at 4-4-4-12/2T timings unless otherwise specified.
Now we can finally go over the results of our testing!
Business Winstone
The Core 2 Duo E6750 did very well here, with the stock result beating out the quad core QX6700, and the overclocked result only really beaten by an unusually high old result from an overclocked E6600 - which may have been due to a slight difference in hardware setup.
Content Creation
The content creation benchmark again gives us very good results, totally in-line with what we observed in the Business Winstone test.
WinRAR
The stock WinRAR results were quite good, and the overclocked ones were even better.
WinRAR Multi-Threaded
Here we see that the multi-threaded WinRAR can actually make good use of four cores - so it does not suffer from the self-imposed "two thread" limit of most other "multi-threaded" benchmarks.
The quad core QX6700 dominates, followed by the overclocked E6750.
The stock result was quite good too.
Sandra CPU
Unfortunately we have migrated away from the older Sandra CPU benchmark, so please take the top scores with a grain of salt as they were generated by an older version!
Sandra Memory
The Sandra memory benchmark is quite interesting. The stock speed E6750 is definitely helped by the 1333MHz FSB, handily beating the stock quad core QX6700 and slaughtering the 1066MHz FSB stock results.
When overclocked... it dominated this chart!
RightMark Read
As I expected, the stock speed 1333MHz FSB E6750 noticably outperforms the 1066MHz FSB E6700, and when overclocked, tops the read bandwidth chart.
RightMark Write
Oh my!
The stock result for the write benchmark badly beats the other 1066MHz/1333MHz FSB results, and when overclocked, the E6750 TOTALLY owns the write bandwidth test!
RightMark Latency
Well, the 975X chipset still preforms better than the P35 "Bearlake" chipset for latency, but other than that, the 6750 did quite well with its 1333MHz FSB.
RightMark Bandwidth
The bandwidth results are excellent, with the stock 1333MHz FSB E6750 results taking first over the other 1333MHz FSB and 1066MHz FSB figures - even some highly overclocked ones.
When overclocked, the E6750 did very well here.
LAME MP3
Well, there is a definite pattern.
The E6750 performs very well at stock, and shines when overclocked.
Obviously LAME only uses two threads; so the E6750 beats even the QX6700!
TMPGEnc
Ok, TMPGEnc can also use all four cores of a quad-core system :-)
The E6750 does well here.
CineBench
This is also an excellent test for multi-core systems; the quad core QX6700 holds a commanding lead; however note how well the dual core 1333MHz FSB E6750 does - especially when overclocked!
POV-Ray
POV-Ray also can take full advantage of more than two cores, so the QX6700 once again leads the pack, however, the E6750 does very well in among the other dual core processors.
Call of Duty
Let's just say that the E6750 at stock speeds can't be beat, and when overclocked... totally takes over the chart.
Commanche 4
Same story here, and it looks like the top result may have been obtained with a 7800GTX instead of the 7800GT we use for processor benchmarking. Sorry!
Doom 3
For some reason, I am reminded of Daffy Duck saying...
"oh boy... oh boy oh boy... oh boy"
Stock E6750 is once again ahead of the processor pack.
An overclocked E6750? Was there any doubt?
Enough said.
Halo
Interesting surprise here - looks like Halo may be multi-threaded! The QX6700 OC wins, but don't worry, the E6750 does very well.
Jedi Knight
Oh boy...
Daffy Duck says the E6750 is good for gamers.
Unreal Tournament 2004
Daffy is right.
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:
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:
Overclocked to 3.8GHz:
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!
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