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Hi there
As I happened to have a e2160 handy a while back, I thought I'd do a direct comparison with a similarly clocked e6600 to see if this budget chip could stand up to its bigger brother.
e2160
Badged as a Pentium Dual Core, nevertheless it is based on the Core 2 Duo architecture but with only 1MB of cache. It has a multiplier of 9 and a default FSB of 800MHz (quad pumped). It is aimed at the budget market and costs £61.09 from OCuk.
e6600
This is a full Conroe chip, with Core 2 Duo architecture and a whopping 4MB of level 2 cache. It has a multiplier of 9 and a default FSB of 1066MHz (quad pumped). It is aimed at the premium market and costs £150.39 from OCuk.
In these tests, I am overclocking both chips to 3.015GHz. As they both have a x9 multi this means they will be running a FSB of 335 MHz (1340 quad pumped). They have been both tested for 8 hours Othos stability.
They are running on a BFG 680i motherboard, with 2GB of OCZ Platinum rev 2 PC6400 RAM at stock. The test rig also has a BFG 8800 GTS 640MB graphics card running at 600/900, and an X-Fi platinum. All benchmarks done at 1280 x 1024.
3d mark 01, 03, 05, 06
A classic test, but worth making just because everyone is so familiar with the numbers:-
A big difference in 01, but the differences get less and less until there is only about 100 points difference in 06.
Doom 3 and Far Cry
Classic games, the standard bearers of any collection.
Far Cry seems to have more of a CPU cache dependency, worth noting if that is your game of choice.
<speculation>
Could be an indicator of the forthcoming performance from Crysis...?
</speculation>
FEAR and Company of Heroes
These are both modern games, a good test for the new architecture. There is a bigger difference in CoH than FEAR, but both seem to have good performance with the budget and premium chips.
Here are all those numbers in full, together with a Supreme Commander benchmark. Supreme Commander is well known to be very CPU dependant, so is a good test for these chips. Also present is SuperPi, another artificial benchmark that is well known.
There is a hit on Supreme Commander, but not too bad (IMHO).
Conclusions
What these graphs tell us is perhaps what we already knew; that the e6600 is faster than the e2160, and that overclocking is cool! Perhaps what isn’t so well known, certainly outside enthusiast circles, is that having only 1MB of CPU level 2 cache isn’t a drag on performance in modern games. The e2160 holds it's own, and certainly didn't notice any slowdown through general operation of windows using the chip. I'd recommend it for medium budget games systems without hesitation.
The e2160 may be called a Pentium, but the similarities end there
As I happened to have a e2160 handy a while back, I thought I'd do a direct comparison with a similarly clocked e6600 to see if this budget chip could stand up to its bigger brother.
e2160
Badged as a Pentium Dual Core, nevertheless it is based on the Core 2 Duo architecture but with only 1MB of cache. It has a multiplier of 9 and a default FSB of 800MHz (quad pumped). It is aimed at the budget market and costs £61.09 from OCuk.
e6600
This is a full Conroe chip, with Core 2 Duo architecture and a whopping 4MB of level 2 cache. It has a multiplier of 9 and a default FSB of 1066MHz (quad pumped). It is aimed at the premium market and costs £150.39 from OCuk.
In these tests, I am overclocking both chips to 3.015GHz. As they both have a x9 multi this means they will be running a FSB of 335 MHz (1340 quad pumped). They have been both tested for 8 hours Othos stability.
They are running on a BFG 680i motherboard, with 2GB of OCZ Platinum rev 2 PC6400 RAM at stock. The test rig also has a BFG 8800 GTS 640MB graphics card running at 600/900, and an X-Fi platinum. All benchmarks done at 1280 x 1024.
3d mark 01, 03, 05, 06
A classic test, but worth making just because everyone is so familiar with the numbers:-
A big difference in 01, but the differences get less and less until there is only about 100 points difference in 06.
Doom 3 and Far Cry
Classic games, the standard bearers of any collection.
Far Cry seems to have more of a CPU cache dependency, worth noting if that is your game of choice.
<speculation>
Could be an indicator of the forthcoming performance from Crysis...?
</speculation>
FEAR and Company of Heroes
These are both modern games, a good test for the new architecture. There is a bigger difference in CoH than FEAR, but both seem to have good performance with the budget and premium chips.
Here are all those numbers in full, together with a Supreme Commander benchmark. Supreme Commander is well known to be very CPU dependant, so is a good test for these chips. Also present is SuperPi, another artificial benchmark that is well known.
There is a hit on Supreme Commander, but not too bad (IMHO).
Conclusions
What these graphs tell us is perhaps what we already knew; that the e6600 is faster than the e2160, and that overclocking is cool! Perhaps what isn’t so well known, certainly outside enthusiast circles, is that having only 1MB of CPU level 2 cache isn’t a drag on performance in modern games. The e2160 holds it's own, and certainly didn't notice any slowdown through general operation of windows using the chip. I'd recommend it for medium budget games systems without hesitation.
The e2160 may be called a Pentium, but the similarities end there
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