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  • dubrov - Sunday, February 11, 2007 - link

    WHY IN ARTICLE PICTURE I SEE:

    VOLTAGE = 1.213 v

    WHILE THE TEXT BELOW THE PICTURE STATES:

    VOLTAGE = 1.468 V

    Which one is true?

    P.S. Bought E4300 yesterday - it DOES NOT POST on FSB > 325 MHz at a default voltage.
    Is it safe to raise the voltage up to 1.5 V (won't it burn the core2 before the temperature sensor reacts)?
  • penga - Sunday, February 4, 2007 - link

    E4300 is the n1 competitor to the X2 EE SFF Series regarding power/performance-efficiency, so why would u not include at least an X2 3800 EE SFF or an 4000+ 65nm in ur tests?
  • coolme - Friday, February 2, 2007 - link

    Overall, this is a great review. The really throughly explained the advantages, and the disadvantages of the E4300. (Basically an underclocked E6700 that's doesn't have virtualization, and E4400 will have a x10 multiplier) I just wanted to say thanks, and note a minor typo in the review.

    In page 7, power consumption the paragraph between the 2 charts "Overclocked, the E6300 uses a bit more power than the X6800 but that’s to be expected.". It's the E4300 that's overclocked, not E6300.

    Thanks, and keep up the good work!
  • lapierrem - Friday, January 19, 2007 - link

    I am surprised, that I have not yet seen a single one of these up on ebay yet.
    What gives? Release something awesome but don't actually put any stock out there...and make everyone wait and the price go up...
  • Yongsta - Sunday, January 14, 2007 - link

    Looks good, can't wait I've been holding on my next upgrade for something like this. Initially I had a Celeron 300 ($100) which I overclocked to 500 mhz+ and outperformed P4 450 ($650). Next upgrade was both Barton 2500 ($90) overclocked to past Barton 3200 speeds & P4 2.4c ($170) at 3.6 ghz. All my purchases were best bang for the buck (including video cards in the past with hacks to enable disabled pipelines, etc) and in this chip it looks like I can get it again.
  • aznskickass - Thursday, January 11, 2007 - link

    The overclocked performance of the E4300 @ 3.37GHz looks very low IMO.

    Anandtech - are you sure the E4300 was not throttling at this point? I would assume 3.37GHz/1.475V on the stock HSF would get pretty hot, possibly hot enough to trigger CPU throttling.

  • just4U - Saturday, January 13, 2007 - link

    Some one mentioned here that a 3Ghz C2D value chip will walk all over Amd's Budgit X2's running at 1.8- 2.0G.

    I sort of found that a rather odd comment to make. Many enthusiast's look at these chips for overclock potential so.. chances are you wouldnt be dealing with a stock X2 either.

    I kinda wish they had the 3800 overclocked as well so we could get a look at both of them and compare it on a more level playing field. Granted the C2D would still walk all over the amd chip but it would be interesting to see the results.

  • cmdrdredd - Thursday, January 11, 2007 - link

    Where is the clock for clock comparisons? E4300 @ same speed as like an E6400 (overclock both to like 3Ghz) and test. That will let us really see if it's worth spending the extra cash for the E6300/6400.
  • harpoon84 - Thursday, January 11, 2007 - link

    The E4300 is slightly faster than the X2 4200+ overall - go ahead, count how many the E4300 wins, and how many the X2 4200+ wins. The E4300 wins the count 8 - 3, although those numbers are a bit misleading as most of the time the margins between the chips are very close.

    In terms of price/performance, the $163 pricetag is justified, but I still prefer it at the Q2 price of $113! ;)
  • Xcom1Cheetah - Thursday, January 11, 2007 - link

    Look pretty tempting but i think it is priced a little higher like

    Firstly it look like as is it a high end Core 2 Celeron (with lower FSB and half the cache BUT 2 cores). So it should be priced in between Celeron and Core 2 Territory.

    Secondly its performance overall at stock speed is between X2 3800+ and X2 4200+.. The 3800+ is going for 133 and 4200+ is for 169... (i m talking about newegg prices)

    So it should be priced like around US $150 at most in my view... and around 3800+ price to give AMD even more tough time.:) but not more than US $150 in any case.

    Just my view..
  • clairvoyant129 - Friday, January 12, 2007 - link

    Look again, the E4300 frags the X2 4200+
  • bob4432 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    i just need to keep on saying to myself, i don't need to upgrade, i don't need to upgrade, i don't need to upgrade.......

    man, what a good time for people that are builing though, intel sure is putting as much of the smackdown on amd (currently running amd so i am not partial to either, just my wallet) as they can.


    when this thing drops to $133, it will be so tempting....hoping ddr2 will drop soon!!!!!
  • kmmatney - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    How far can you overclock the 4300 with a DDR motherboard, so I can use the 2GB I already have? With the ASRock 775Dual-VSTA LGA 775, which usually can get to 312 MhZ FSB, you should be able to get to 2.8 Ghz, which isn't too bad. Are there any better options out there that allow you to use DDR?
  • dm - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    http://fanboyreview.blogspot.com/2006/12/brag-one-...">http://fanboyreview.blogspot.com/2006/1...one-hund...
  • Invader57 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    I believe this article has the prices wrong. According to the recent Intel news release, the E4300 price will be reduced to $113 in Q2, when the E4400 is released at $133.
  • atenza - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    Well, you're right! There's a mistake in the article.
  • docmilo - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    I bought a cheap mb/cpu combo to get into dual core some time ago. I currently am running an 805 Pentium D in an ECS board, RC410L/800-M. I run great overclocked to 3.4 ghz from stock 2.66. This chip is only at 533 fsb. CPU-Z shows the fsb at 1500 to get this speed. I think this testing should have been done on a mb with a max 800fsb since I believe this chip is for that type of mb.

    What kind of OC should I expect on an 800mhz fsb motherboard?
  • atenza - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    Your mobo doesn't support Core 2 at all. Some improved voltage regulator is needed, having socket 775 is not enough.
  • GeekUSA - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    Does anyone know where I can get the program that overclocks these beautiful chips?

    Thank You.
  • Toebot - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    http://www.cpuid.com/clockgen.php">null

  • Sunrise089 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    is this a joke??? Overclocking is done in the BIOS.
  • duploxxx - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    I guess you check the web prices before you post such a comment? to my opinion start price is as high as a 4200 and performance wise more or less the same depending on apps (except for real multithread offcourse where it is known that the c2d performance is less dominating towards the k8).

    "The E4300 gets even better in Q2 when its price will drop from $163 to $133, making it even more of a bargain.
    Today's review will focus on the overall performance of the E4300 at stock speeds as well as when overclocked. At stock speeds the E4300 is priced as a cheaper alternative to the Core 2 Duo E6300 and AMD's Athlon 64 X2 3800+, thus the comparison between those two chips is obvious"

    newegg price 3800: 135
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...
    newegg price 4200: 169
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...
    newegg price e6300: 190
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82...
  • tappertrainman - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    Can anyone let me know if I would see a big difference upgrading from an A64 (either 1.8GHz or 2.0GHz, I forget) with 1GB of RAM to a Core2 Duo with 2G of RAM?

    I mostly use the computer for WoW, but I do run it at the very highest resolution, widescreen, on a 22in monitor. I also have Ventrilo running at the same time. Otherwise the computer is mostly used for music, internet, etc.

    Am I only going to see a difference if I'm multi-tasking (i.e. WoW, and internet open) or will it improve the single-tasking significantly?

    Thanks for any help or advice.
  • harpoon84 - Friday, January 12, 2007 - link

    A C2D @ 3GHz+ will be MUCH faster than an A64 @ 1.8 - 2GHz at everything, single or multithreaded software, as well as multitasking. It will also help your WoW raid framerates significantly.
  • oneils - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    For games, your best component to upgrade is video card. Especially if you turn up the eye candy at high resolutions. This depends though on what platform you are currently using. If you have pci-e for video, then you might want to upgrade the vid card first.

    A CPU upgrade for wow might not give a noticeable boos...unless you run many applications in the background (ventrillo doesn't take too many resources, I don't think...so I wouldn't be worried about that).

  • tappertrainman - Friday, January 12, 2007 - link

    I already have a 7900GT, are any of the new ones going to be a big step up?
  • clairvoyant129 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    This is a great review, I can build an awesome budget PC for my folks back at home with this and a DS3 for less $$$. Makes AMD's current offerings look like a complete joke.

  • hubajube - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    Which corsair ram did you guys use?
  • OcHungry - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    Mr. Anand, This review is as objective as can be and I appreciate your fairness to both sides of the coin (Intel vs. AMD). I hope your staff take example and in the future and conduct their reviews in the same manner as you have.
    besiar awlee.
  • ssiu - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    Is it 100% stable (per your usual rigorous standards) at 3.375Ghz/1.468V overclocked setting with the stock Intel cooler?

    Is the Intel stock cooler the same for the whole Core 2 Duo line (from E4300/E6300 up to E6700/X6800)?
  • yiranhu - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    9X multiplier!!! Now there's absolutely no point in buying the 6300/6400!!
  • yyrkoon - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    Unless of course, you're going the budget CPU server route, and need virtualization. For example, using Xen, in order to run Windows in a domU (VM), you need VT.
  • yehuda - Thursday, January 11, 2007 - link

    Hi,

    Who else should be concerned with the lack of VT support?

    If I run emulators locally (my personal experience includes bochs, qemu and DOSBox), is there anything I would lose going with the E4300?

    Thanks
  • Yoshi911 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    I think that with a 3ghz Opty144, My next upgrade will be to a Opty165 that I can run at 3ghz...2mb cache and dual core, good for gaming still.. all I'll ever need...

    SPEND YOUR MONEY ON VIDEO CARD UPGRADES AND RAM!!! if you don't have 2gb's ram and a nice video card... DONT EVEN THINK about upgrading platforms.
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    And if you don't have 2GB of RAM, don't even think about spending the money on 2x1GB DDR-400! As for me, I have an Opty 165 that tops out at around 2.6GHz with a Scythe Ninja cooler, so you'll be lucky to get 3.0GHz. Even if you do get 3.0GHz, a Core 2 E4300 overclocked to 3.5GHz+ (remember we're talking stock cooler in this article) would beat it for performance. Now, if you have 2GB of DDR and a decent CPU and you are mostly worried about games, then the GPU is the bigger issue. If you don't have any of those things and need to upgrade, you'll be best getting Core 2 with DDR2 and a fast GPU, rather than X2/Opteron and DDR/DDR2 and a fast GPU.
  • Yoshi911 - Thursday, January 11, 2007 - link

    Yeah but we're talking about cost effective performance for games... 90fps vs 190fps is going to look very little difference.. the next upgrade any gamer should be thinking about should be a DX10 compatable system.
  • Doh! - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    Why hasn't yet Intel released this cpu for the consumer in the US? This cpu has been widely available since Jan. 5 in Korea. Isn't the US usuually the first place for a new cpu launch?
  • deathwalker - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    Very nice reiview and the introduction of a true bargin in CPU's. Alas though..once again us SFF builders(I have a microfly case) are out in the cold since nearly all the Matx C2D motherboards are "crap" overclockers. This is not the place for it..but I will none the less rant on the Mobo builders for not making an honest effort to give us a decent C2D product. By decent, I mean something that will run well at setting other than stock out the box defaults. Nice job AT..this article give hope to builders on a budget.
  • tayhimself - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    -sigh- i complained of this after ATs informative review on uATX cases asking if anyone knew any uATX 965 boards that would OC decently (350 FSB even). Too bad I got no respnoses then either.
  • Goty - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    I'm not sure the price difference here is quite enough to pull anyone away from the E6300 (or the E6320 when it hits the market). It's only $50 cheaper on average, but you lose the faster FSB of the E6300 and I've seen a lot of E6300s overclock a lot better than this chip.
  • sdsdv10 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    I think the point was, with higher multiplier of the 4300 over the 6300 (or 6320) you don't need to go to such high FSB numbers (requiring more expensive DDR2 RAM) to get a good overclock. That might save you another $25-50. So for a MB, CPU and RAM combo you would pay say $450 for a 6300 setup, but you "may" get the same performance out of a 4300 setup for ~$350 (say $50 less on the CPU and another $50 on the RAM, roughly 20-25% less). That's a nice savings for those on a tight buget.
  • atenza - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    Exactly! And it's also good news for people like me, who want to build a nice little (yet overclocked) Micro-ATX system. None of those boards currently gets anywhere beyond ~330 FSB. At 333MHz FSB, the E6300 would only run at 2.33 GHz. The E4300 would achieve 3.00 GHz, which is enough for me.
  • Patrese - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    If it doesn't come to Brazil with the ridiculous price premiums the rest of the Core 2 line is coming (an E6600 costs US$550 here!), that chip is destined to be the next one I have, so that I can get rid of my good-old Athlon XP 3200+... Great news in that sense, but what I find really irritating about Intel is the short life of their chipsets and motherboards... Every year or so I'd have to upgrade my motherboard to upgrade processors.

    BTW, no AMD fanboy here... If K8L proves to be troublesome on AM2 motherboards you're gonna see me complaining about that too. I just find the idea of upgrading motherboards so fast irritating... :(
  • 1111111 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    quote:

    Windows Media Encoder is far more favorable to AMD CPUs and thus the E4300 ends up being a little slower than the X2 3800+.


    The Windows Media Encoder chart shows the E4300 faster than the X2 3800+ and the D945...so either the chart is wrong or the sentence is wrong:)
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    See above - fixed.
  • harpoon84 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    "Windows Media Encoder is far more favorable to AMD CPUs and thus the E4300 ends up being a little slower than the X2 3800+. Our overclocked chip ends up, once again, on top of the charts."

    Actually, the E4300 is faster than the X2 3800+ in this test.

    "At stock speeds, the E4300 ends up offering similar performance to the Athlon 64 X2 3800+."

    You are being overly kind to the X2 3800+. The E4300 beats it in the majority of the benchmarks. The E4300 is the equal of the X2 4200+ if you tally up the results.
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    I have edited these two paragraphs to better reflect the results. The X2 3800+ is currently $30 cheaper than the initial launch price of the E4300, so it's still the cheapest way to get into a dual core setup without getting the power requirements of NetBurst, but I don't think most of us would really recommend X2 3800+ over the E4300... it's about a tie in terms of recommendation, depending on the intended use.
  • duploxxx - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    well if you wouldn't recommend the 3800 over the e4300 maybe oc' wise yess, but don't forget to mention that a decent intel chipset also costs 30$ more than the amd solution...

    so pricewise a and performance wise 4200 is still more interesting than the e4300 unless you oc.

    try some vista benchmarks and you'll see what the best chips are future wise...... AMD for sure.
  • OcHungry - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    I think people have misconception about AMD and vista (64bit). Have you run the 64bit vista? most of the benchmarks I tried w/ AMD's dual core were slower or froze cold. Vista has a long ways to go yet to be a choice OS. There is also the 32bit version of vista if you want C2D to run it. As for me I will not run vista until its matured and games can run faster (than winxp). Nvidia has not created a bug free vista driver yet. The latest nvidia vista (64bit) driver I installed turned out buggy and did not fully install (No nvidia display panel). I dont know, maybe it was me. But I have practically given up on it and am back to winxp.
  • JarredWalton - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    There seems to be an assumption by some people that Core 2 is going to somehow be slower in 64-bit mode. I highly doubt this for a couple reason: one, AMD isn't faster in 32-bit; two, 64-bit vs. 32-bit isn't a huge difference in architecture. Basically, 64-bit is just 64-bit registers and a few extra opcodes.
  • najames - Thursday, January 11, 2007 - link

    It would be nice if they would include 64bit benchmarks, even nicer would be 64bit Linux benchmarks since I am not paying $300-400 for Vi$ta.
  • mlambert890 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2...">http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2...

    Core 2 performs a few fetch and decode tricks in IA32 that it cant perform in EM64T. People seem to be overdramatizing the presumed effect that these tricks (or lack thereof) would have on 64bit performance. Ive done a lot of testing with C2 in various forms on XP, 2k3 and Vista x64 and have seen no defficiency with real world performance of C2 EM64T. I'm confident that benchmarks will prove this out.
  • Accord99 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    If you're not into overclocking, there are numerous cheap C2D motherboards and unlike the A64, you don't need fast memory. Unlike the A64 which requires DDR2-800 just to perform like S939 DDR-400. And if you overclock, then a simple overclock gives you performance that no AMD can touch.

    And for Vista, the C2D will out-perform the A64 just like it outperforms the A64 in everything else.
  • Final Hamlet - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    Hello!

    Could you explain to me if Intel's energy-saving feature still works in idle situations when overclocked or does changing the FSB mean that the CPU is _always_ running at those high speeds?

    Can you give me a link to a tutorial how to change FSB speed - or is it simply a matter of mainboard BIOS settings?
  • IntelUser2000 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    quote:

    Hello!

    Could you explain to me if Intel's energy-saving feature still works in idle situations when overclocked or does changing the FSB mean that the CPU is _always_ running at those high speeds?

    Can you give me a link to a tutorial how to change FSB speed - or is it simply a matter of mainboard BIOS settings?


    I believe EIST won't work with overclocking(someone update me), but C1E works. The lowest speed at C1E will increase proportionally to FSB speeds though.

    Changing FSB speed is done by BIOS. You can do it from Windows too if your mainboard has the software for it.
  • Final Hamlet - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    What is more efficient regarding energy-saving?
    C1e or EIST?
    I really would like to see documented in the article _how_ the CPU was overclocked.
  • mongoosesRawesome - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    search google for core 2 duo overclocking guide.
  • keitaro - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    All I can say is... wow... just simply wow...

    A friend of mine is considering sticking with AMD for building a new budget system. I'll have to show her this to see if this'll change her mind. I've already suggested to her to go where the performance is. I hope she'll change her mind after looking through this quick article.

    I so wish I could jump on the Core2 bandwagon right now. I'm glad that Intel is going to put 4MB on all of their 6000 series processors. This'll give me an additional incentive to look at their lowest 4MB Core2 offering. All I'd need then is a good matching motherboard and some quality DDR2 RAM.
  • Calin - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    This could very well be put at work in a performance microATX board. When a microATX boards review will be here?
  • Macuser89 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    I would like to see the same benchmarks, but with the x6800 overclocked as far as it can go. with the same cooling as the e4300.
  • hubajube - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    Nice OC and I might consider this instead of a E6400. I'll have to wait how the 4MB versions stack up. Also, I'd like to see how it OC's on a Nvidia chipset board. No DS3 for me.
  • tuteja1986 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    Same
  • IntelUser2000 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    The 4MB cache and faster FSB is good for performance, but also for raising stock performance from Intel's point of view. The extra cache and more bandwidth enables Core 2 Duo to scale better than the ones that don't. I would like to see E4300 at 800MHz FSB and clocked to say even E6600 speeds to see how it scales but I am expecting too much :P.

    E4300 at 3.38GHz has an FSB of 1500MHz, which is 40% more than the stock X6800.
  • IntelUser2000 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    From the idle power consumption measurements, it seems to use the new Core 2 Duo steppings that has C1E power consumption of 12W. You can see 8W difference from the normal Core 2 Duos, which are at 20W-22W(20W for E6700 and 22W for others).
  • Goty - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    Yeah, but that doesn't matter to 99% of the desktop consumer market. Most only care about power consumption at full load as it is usually a good indication of heat output.
  • hubajube - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    quote:

    Most only care about power consumption at full load as it is usually a good indication of heat output.
    The only people that care about power consumption are geeks and corporate IT departments. Joe SixPack doesn't know and doesn't care. All they want is a machine that does email, stores porn, and surfs the web. You guys need to get out more often.
  • Xentropy - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link

    You can be sure even Joe SixPack will notice if turning on his PC sounds like a jet engine starting up, though, and higher power consumption means louder cooling solutions.
  • hubajube - Thursday, January 11, 2007 - link

    quote:

    You can be sure even Joe SixPack will notice if turning on his PC sounds like a jet engine starting up, though, and higher power consumption means louder cooling solutions.
    J6P still won't notice because they usually buy low rent Dell's and HP's not, custom built jobs like we have. Like I said, power consumption means nothing to regular computer buyers.

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