Intel Core 2 Duo & Core 2 Extreme Processors, Chipsets And Performance Analysis

How we configured our test systems: When configuring our test systems for the following set of benchmarks, we first entered their respective system BIOSes and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High-Performance Defaults." We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set memory timings for DDR2-800 at 4,4,4,12 1T latency.  The hard drives were then formatted, and Windows XP Professional (SP2) was installed. When the Windows installation was complete, we installed the drivers necessary for our components, and removed Windows Messenger from the system. Auto-Updating and System Restore were then disabled, and we set up a 768MB permanent page file on the same partition as the Windows installation. Lastly, we set Windows XP's Visual Effects to "best performance," installed all of our benchmarking software, defragged the hard drives, and ran all of the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems AMD & Intel Inside!

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2007 Pro Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran five of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2007 suite (CPU, Multimedia, Memory, Cache, and Latency) with the new Core 2 Duo E6700 and Core 2 Extreme X6800 processors. All of the scores reported below were taken with the processors running at their default clock speeds of 2.66GHz and 2.93GHz, respectively.

SANDRA CPU Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz	SANDRA MM Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz	SANDRA Memory Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz / DDR2-800	SANDRA Cache Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz	SANDRA Latency Core 2 Duo E6700 2.66GHz
SANDRA CPU Core 2 Extreme E6800 2.93GHz	SANDRA MM Core 2 Extreme E6800 2.93GHz	SANDRA MM Core 2 Extreme E6800 2.93GHz / DDR2-800	SANDRA Cache Core 2 Extreme E6800 2.93GHz	SANDRA Latency Core 2 Extreme E6800 2.93GHz

The lite-duty SANDRA benchmarks tell an interesting story. The CPU arithmetic benchmark shows the Core 2 processors performing very well in the ALU portion of the test, but in the FPU test the Core 2 CPUs hang alongside an FX-62 and get thrashed by Netburst based Pentium Extreme Editions.  According to the multi-media benchmark though, the Core 2 Duo is simply in a league of its own -- nothing comes close to the 6 digit scores put up by the E6700 and X6800.

SANDRA's memory benchmark isn't very interesting because nothing has really changed in regard to available bandwidth over current systems. Because the Core 2 is compatible with current chipsets, it's bound by the same memory controller used in today's Pentium D based systems. Their 5.6GB/s+ scores put the Core 2 processors we tested on-par with their Pentium powered counterparts.  We should note, however, that we also ran a few tests on the nForce 4 SLIX16 based Asus board using Corsair's TWIN2X2048-6400C3 memory kit and the X6800 and bandwidth scores peaked at almost 5.8GB/s.

The Cache and Latency tests also produced some interesting results.  Because these benchmarks can reside solely in each CPU's 4MB of cache, latency and cache bandwidth is much better on the Core 2 architecture versus the Athlon 64, even though the A64 features an on-die memory controller.