Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Desktop Processor

The Bottom Line

The Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 provides a good stepping stone between the lower cost E6300/6400 dual core processors and the higher end Extreme and Quad core Core 2 models. This processor will be able to handle gaming and high performance computing without any complaints. It would just be nice to see the prices drop a bit more on this model.

Pros

• Strong Multitasking
• Excellent Gaming Performance

Cons

• Expensive When Compared to Performance Differences of E6300/E6400 Models
• Important to Match It Properly With Proper Clocked RAM

Description

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe Dual Core
• 2.4GHz Operating Frequency
• 1066MHz Front Side Bus
• 4MB Shared Cache
• Support For SSE4 Instructions
• 64-Bit Extensions
• 0.85-1.3525V Operation
• 65nm Process
• Heatsink Included
• Three Year Warranty

Guide Review - Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Desktop Processor

3/8/07 – Intel's Core 2 Duo E6600 was the upper middle end of the Core 2 lineup when it was first launched. Since that time, additional Extreme and Quad Core processors have been released making it really the middle of the road choice in terms of performance and price.

The Core 2 Duo is a big step up from the original Core Duo mobile processors. The most notable feature of the Core 2 lineup is the 64-bit extensions that let it function with 64-bit software including the new Windows Vista operating system. The E6600 also has 4MB of internal cache to share between its two cores, double that of the E6300 and E6400 models. Each of the models also features different clock speeds so the E6600 is definitely several steps above the E6400.

Testing of the E6600 processor was done on a Dell XPS 710 desktop computer system with the nForce 590 SLI chipset along with 2GB of PC2-5300 DDR2 memory.

Overall the performance of the E6600 was extremely strong. Whether it is single core applications such as gaming or office applications or multi-threaded applications such as digital video and multimedia, the processor was able to complete tasks very quickly. In fact, in most applications, the Core 2 Duo E6600 was able to outperform even high end AMD Athlon 64 X2 processors. About the only area where the AMD Athlon architecture outperforms the new Core 2 Duo is writing data directly to the memory, but this is easily overshadowed by other aspects of the processor.

The only real problem that the Core 2 Duo E6600 has is its pricing. Consumers might be better off going for the lower E6300 or E6400 unless they need faster processing performance for applications such as video encoding. For general office applications and web browser, users won't notice much difference.