Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 - A great dual core Intel Cpu - but cache is king @ Magicmc.com Reviews

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 - A great dual core Intel Cpu - but cache is king

AMD's Athlon 64's dominated the high-end market for quite some time but with the advent of Intel's core two duo CPUs their reign has come to a fast and now to make up for that fact AMD has chosen to slash prices. This made us very interested in the more affordable Intel Core 2 Duos as they were to be the topic of AMD competition with the Athlon so soundly beaten at the top of the line. While there's not much difference between Intel's high-end chips in the Intel Core 2 Duo E6400, in fact they're manufactured on the same line, running a slightly lower clock rate and disabling half of the L2 cache makes these Intel Core 2 CPUs more affordable to build and still leaves them with plenty of room for competitive performance. Bringing the cost of a duel core CPU below $300 puts these super performers well within the reach of most system builders and PC consumers, allowing the dual (and late quad) Core Intel computer processors to gain market share against the top AMD competitors with style.

On the performance front, the E6400 was slightly slower than the AMD 64 X2 4600+ and 5000+, but beat them out slightly in price. The L2 caching scheme, being ruduced from 2X2MB to 2MB total was a little disappointing, but that is how Intel was able to drop the purchase price, and with a slightly slower clock speed than the next model up the line, the E6600, it definitely had it top performance put in its place, but had nowhere near the effect that I had expected. Still holding more L2 cache capacity than the AMD competitors (which often had only 2x512k) it made less of an impact when taking on the competition, but made more of a difference when comparing upstream Intel CPUs with the same Core 2 structure. if you've always wanted the multitasking, fast results of Core 2 Duo CPUs, but do not want to shell out more than a few hundred for your central processing unit, then the E6400 is a great place to start.

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