Intel's New Core 2 Duo Processors Run Blazingly Fast

In our WorldBench 5 test suite, Intel's Core 2 Duo reference system outscored a matching system equipped with AMD's high-end Athlon 64 FX-62 chip by 17 percent. We also tested shipping PCs based on several chips in the Core 2 Duo family, including a water-cooled, overclocked ABS machine that posted a mark of 181 on our WorldBench 5 test--the highest WorldBench score we've ever seen. (See PC World's detailed test results and chart. For full reviews of five new Core 2 Duo-based systems, click the product names in the results chart.)
All of our Core 2 Duo configurations performed impressively, and the higher-end models in particular should allow power users to handle demanding multimedia work on their PCs more quickly and to perform multiple computing tasks at once more efficiently. Gaming, too, will receive an impressive boost from systems equipped with the new chips.
Though its new products are good news for users, things are different for some Intel employees, as the company announced the layoff of 1000 management employees.
The Core 2 Duo processor line ranges from the 1.86-GHz E6300 chip ($183) with 2MB of cache to the 2.93-GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800 chip ($999) with 4MB of cache; all have a 1066-MHz system bus. (Intel leaves the "Duo" designation off of its X6800 CPU.)
Though Core 2 Duo chips use the same Socket 775 interface as current Pentium 4 and Pentium D chips, they require new chip sets, so you'll have to get a new motherboard--you can't just pop a Core 2 Duo chip into your existing Intel-based PC and reap the tremendous performance gains. The Core 2 Duo reference systems we tested used a motherboard with Intel's 975X Express chip set (boards using the P965 Express chip set will also be available); nVidia and ATI have their own Core 2 Duo boards as well.
The new processors and systems will be on sale from various vendors beginning July 27, with some configurations of Core 2 Duo machines checking in at surprisingly reasonable prices.
Our motherboard Core 2 Duo test setup consisted of an Intel 975X Express board, 2GB of DDR2-667 memory, a pair of SATA hard drives configured in a striped array, and an nVidia GeForce 7800GT-based graphics card. We swapped first a 2.93-GHz Core 2 Extreme X6800 chip and then a 2.67-GHz Core 2 E6700 chip into that setup to generate scores we could compare directly to an otherwise identically configured system featuring AMD's new DDR2-capable AM2 platform and its top-of-the-line FX-62 processor.
Both of the Intel setups bested the AMD-based system on every test in our WorldBench 5 suite as well as on every one of our gaming tests (see chart below). The improvement on WorldBench 5's multitasking tests, which involve running a Web browsing session in Mozilla while encoding a file with Windows Media Encoder, was particularly dramatic. You'll also see notable gains in Photoshop and similar graphics applications.
In addition to our lab-built systems, we tested several vendor-supplied PCs. For example, Dell's $3985 XPS 700, a high-end system based on the 2.67-GHz Duo E6700 processor, came with 2GB of RAM, an nVidia GeForce 7950 GX2 Dual-GPU graphics board with 1GB of SDRAM, and two 320GB SATA hard drives in a Raid 0 array. That system (whose price includes a 24-inch wide-screen monitor) also earned a score of 153 on WorldBench 5, well ahead of the 142 posted by the previous top scorer, a 2.6-GHz AMD Athlon 64 FX-60-based Xi system.
Dell's $2350 XPS 410--a relatively mainstream system based on the midrange 2.4-GHz E6600 CPU--shipped with 2GB of RAM, an nVidia GeForce 7900GS graphics board, and two 320GB SATA drives configured in a Raid 0 array. That machine (whose price includes a 20-inch wide-screen LCD) earned a score of 138 on WorldBench 5, matching the score posted by AMD's high-end FX-62 chip on our motherboard test bed.
But even those notable scores paled in comparison to the performance of the overclocked system that ABS sent us. The $4199 water-cooled ABS Ultimate X9--which shipped with 2GB of RAM, a pair of Radeon X1900 Crossfire graphics boards, two superfast Western Digital 150GB SATA drives configured in a striped RAID array, and a Core 2 Extreme X6800 chip overclocked from 2.93 GHz to run at 3.5 GHz--turned in a WorldBench 5 score of 181. Obviously, this system is not a likely choice for typical buyers, but its score is by far the highest we've seen from a shipping system. And it may indicate how much headroom Intel's Core microarchitecture possesses.