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Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 Review September 05, 2008 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: With dual processing cores clocked at 3.33GHz, Intel's Core 2 Duo E8600 is a serious performer, but it's an even more impressive OC'er. Check out Brandon's thoughts on the CPU in our Core 2 Duo E8600 review!
 Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 Review | Page:: ( 1 / 11 ) |
While it has nearly been two years since the first quad-core CPU arrived from Intel, we’re still in a holding pattern waiting for more apps that are truly capable of taking advantage of all four cores: we’ve certainly seen games with independent threads for physics, networking, AI, etc, but none of them have really made a profound case for upgrading to quad core. Quite frankly we say this because we’ve seen a number of games make the case for quad-core ahead of their retail release, but when push comes to shove and the game actually ships, the final result hasn’t matched up to the hype.
There are some exceptions to this however. Gas Powered Games Supreme Commander is one title that does scale fairly well across four cores, although it can be difficult to benchmark the exact impact in an actual gameplay scenario. In fact, the RTS genre as a whole has been the quickest to take advantage of multithreading so far.
Lost Planet is another game that scales quite well as you add 4 or more processing cores.
Of course, there are plenty of apps beyond gaming that do take advantage of more than two cores. Content creation apps such as Adobe Photoshop and Premiere, Pinnacle Studio, CyberLink Power Producer and Power Director, and professional applications like 3D Studio Max are all more than capable of pushing today’s latest quad-core CPUs.
On the other hand, if you’re the type of user who doesn’t usually dabble in video encoding or content creation, none of this matters to you. All you care about is which processor is going to deliver the best blend of performance and price for your needs. Power consumption and overclocking may also be important criteria for some enthusiasts.
For these types of users, a quad core CPU like Intel’s highly popular Core 2 Quad Q6600 probably wouldn’t be the best solution. The Q6600 is clocked at just 2.4GHz with a 1066MHz FSB and Intel’s older, less efficient 65-nm manufacturing process. Another downside of quad-core processors is that they don’t scale as far as dual-core CPUs when it comes to overclocking.
Fortunately Intel has a solution for these users who crave performance, efficiency, and scalability, yet don’t need four cores. Intel’s solution? Wolfdale!
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Meet Wolfdale
Intel’s latest Core 2 Duo E8000 series CPUs are all built around Intel’s Wolfdale core. Wolfdale is a card carrying member of Intel’s Penryn family of 45-nm CPUs. If you recall, with Penryn Intel has incorporated a number of improvements beyond the smaller 45-nm manufacturing process. For instance, Penryn is Intel’s first CPU to incorporate SSE4. In addition to compiler optimizations, SSE4 incorporates a number of “application targeted accelerators” which are hard-coded onto the processor’s die to improve performance in gaming, video encoding, 3D rendering, and photo imaging apps. Penryn also features a new 128-bit wide single-pass shuffle unit that’s designed to improve Penryn’s performance with SSE2, SSE3, and SSE4 instructions that have shuffle-like operations.
Penryn also incorporates a new divider technique that provides double the divider speed over previous processors when handling math computations and improved virtualization.
The new features most enthusiasts will especially enjoy though are Penryn’s larger L2 cache (6MB of L2 cache in the case of dual-core Wolfdale CPUs, and 12MB for quad-core Yorkfield) and faster 1333MHz FSB speed. Combined these two new features offer a significant boost over Intel’s previous CPUs.
Intel’s latest Wolfdale processor is the Core 2 Duo E8600. Clocked at 3.33GHz, the E8600 is Intel’s fastest Core 2 CPU in terms of raw clock speed. Let’s take a closer look at the CPU…
| The E8600 | Page:: ( 2 / 11 ) |
Here are the specs on the Core 2 Duo E8600:
On paper, the E8600 boasts some formidable specs for a dual-core CPU. As we mentioned earlier its 3.33GHz clock is the highest of any Core 2 CPU, including Intel’s vaunted Core 2 Extreme line. But all isn’t perfect with the processor. Take a look at this image:
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That, dear readers is the cooler Intel shipped with our E8600 sample. Intel’s heatsink/fan unit is tiny, and doesn’t even boast a copper slug to improve cooling, instead Intel relies on an all aluminum design with their standard fan. The heatsink itself measures just over half an inch in height!
While we don’t doubt that the E8600 is more than capable of running just fine at stock speeds with this cooler, when you fork over $270 or more for a processor you obviously expect to get a better heatsink than this.
Obviously we ditched this cooler for our trusty all-copper Zalman CNPS9500 that we use for all our Core 2 reviews, including overclocking.
The future
Intel’s latest Core 2 Duo may also be its last. Based on leaked Intel roadmaps, it’s been speculated by some that the E8600 may be Intel’s last Penryn-based dual-core CPU before dual-core Nehalem-based CPUs arrive next year. The chip is also the first Core 2 Duo CPU to be based on Intel’s new E0 stepping, previously Wolfdale processors relied on Intel’s C0 stepping.
According to Intel documents, the new E0 stepping contains “Speed path improvements enabling higher speed bins”. This should stimulate the attention of any enthusiast who is interested in overclocking, as it could potentially lead to greater OC’ing potential. For power misers, the E0 stepping also features a new power status indicator and new instruction extensions (XSAVE/SRSTOR), along with greener, more environmentally friendly halide-free packaging.
The new feature you’re probably most interested in though is overclocking. Here the E8600 didn’t disappoint…
Overclocking
Over the years we’ve seen some CPUs that were pretty serious OC’ers, but we’ve never seen anything like the E8600, this chip is just begging to be overclocked. Don’t believe us? We hit 4.0GHz at default voltage with our E8600 chip! That’s a 670MHz OC and we still haven’t touched the CPU voltage setting in BIOS!
Slowly but surely we continued to crank up the FSB and voltage, eventually settling on 1.375V of juice and 452MHz FSB. Right around this point we needed to go beyond 1.4V in order to achieve complete Vista stability: 1.4V bought us 100% stability at 458MHz, and 1.45V got us past 460MHz. Eventually we settled on an FSB speed of 464MHz, yielding a final clock of 4.64GHz:
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We’re pretty sure we could have pushed the CPU even further if we were willing to go even higher on the voltage, but obviously considering this is a 45-nm processor we didn’t want to kill the processor.
| System Setup | Page:: ( 3 / 11 ) |
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700
Intel Core 2 Duo E8500
Intel Core 2 Duo E8600
ASUS P5E3 Premium
AMD Athlon X2 6400+
AMD Phenom 9950
ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe
ATI Radeon 4870 512MB
Catalyst 8.8
4GB Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4
150GB Western Digital Raptor
Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit w/Service Pack 1
Benchmarks
Company of Heroes 1.71 (running DX9)
Lost Planet
World In Conflict
Crysis
| Power/Media Encoding/Rendering Benchmarks | Page:: ( 4 / 11 ) |
| World In Conflict Performance | Page:: ( 5 / 11 ) |
World In Conflict – Direct3D
| Company Of Heroes | Page:: ( 6 / 11 ) |
Company of Heroes – Direct3D
| Crysis | Page:: ( 7 / 11 ) |
Crysis – Direct3D
| Lost Planet | Page:: ( 8 / 11 ) |
Lost Planet – Direct3D
| Quake Wars | Page:: ( 9 / 11 ) |
Quake Wars – OpenGL
| Ballistics Report | Page:: ( 10 / 11 ) |
Pros
Penryn Architecture: Intel’s new Penryn architecture incorporates a number of improvements that are designed to improve performance while also delivering greater power consumption and performance per watt. We’ll start with performance though.
Intel’s Penryn core features a 1333MHz front-side bus and 6MB of L2 cache. In previous testing we’ve found that each tweak roughly buys Penryn the equivalent of a 200MHz bump in performance in comparison to older Conroe-based Core 2 CPUs.
But these aren’t the only tweaks that Intel has incorporated.
Intel has integrated a new SSE4 instruction set designed to improve multimedia and game performance, as well as a new shuffle unit that’s designed to improve SSE2, SSE3, and SSE4 performance. As you saw in our DivX testing, Intel’s new SSE4 instructions can reap huge dividends with the right software.
Other new features are designed to improve Penryn’s divide speed and improved virtualization.
3.33GHz Clock Speed: With its 3.33GHz clock speed, the Core 2 Duo E8600 is the fastest Core 2 CPU Intel has ever produced in terms of sheer core clock. Remember that besides IPC, MHz is the second variable that affects a CPU’s performance.
10.0 Clock Multiplier: The Core 2 Duo E8600 ships with a 10.0 clock multiplier, the highest multiplier of any Core 2 Duo E8000 series CPU. This is a welcome feature for anyone OC’ing the processor, as you don’t have to hit a high FSB speed to achieve nice overclocks.
For example, most of today’s motherboards are easily capable of hitting 400MHz FSB. With an E8600 in tow this 400MHz FSB would yield you a 4.0GHz E8600 CPU. With an E8500 processor you’d need to hit 421MHz.
An 11.0 multiplier would be even sweeter, but unfortunately it’s rumored that the E8600 is as high as Intel will go before moving on to dual-core Nehalem in 2009.
E0 Stepping: The E0 stepping further improves the E8600’s OC’ing potential. For competitive reasons Intel obviously won’t reveal what enhancements they’ve incorporated into the new stepping, but it will make its way into other Core 2 CPUs shortly.
If you want to guarantee that you’re getting an E0 stepping though, you have to buy an E8600. If you pick up an E8500 or E8400 you may get lucky and take home an E0, but it’s not certain.
Cons
Cooling: Intel’s stock heatsink/fan unit is adequate enough if all you plan to do is run the Core 2 Duo E8600 at stock speeds, but any enthusiast is going to toss this cooler in the trash immediately. It’s a shame that such a fine CPU is paired with such a tiny cooler; we see lots of wasted space in our nation’s landfills as a result.
Price: Officially the E8600 carries a distributor price tag of $266 in quantities of 1,000; the same price as Intel’s Core 2 Quad Q6700, Q9300 and Q9400. This price is also $83 more than the E8500 on Intel’s price list.
The question is, is the E8600’s 164MHz clock speed advantage worth the extra $83? Considering that the chip bought us an improvement of 2-3%, for a lot of people the answer is probably no, particularly if you value price/performance.
Only two cores: While the software world is still playing catch up to quad-core, multithreaded apps are slowly beginning to appear. Once these apps become more widespread, dual-core CPUs like the Core 2 Duo E8600 will be just as outdated as single-core parts are today.
| Final Verdict | Page:: ( 11 / 11 ) |