Intel Core 2 Duo E8400

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
Excellent midrange CPU primed for overclocking

WHEN A NEW $999 quad-core processor hits the market and sets benchmark records, it's front-page news, but it's just as exciting when you get firs-rate performance for a fifth of that price. With a clock speed of 3GHz, 6MB of L2 cache, SSE 4.1 instructions, and impressive overclockability, Intel's Core 2 Duo E8400 leaves last year's top-of-the-line processors in the dust - and yet this "midrange" chip cost under $200.
The E8400 is based on Intel's 45-nanometer (nm) process. This socket 775 chip runs on a 1,333MHz system bus, so you'll need a motherboard with a recent chipset, such as the Intel P35 or X38, though you can also use them with nVidia nForce 680 boards, as well as newer 780 and 790 boards.
The chip's performance is excellent. In test that don't take advantage of more than two cores, the E8400 bested a quad-core QX9650, though applications that can use more than two cores didn't fare as well, of course. Still, only a small percentage of today's applications currently take advantage of more than two cores.
The E8400 has lots of overclocking headroom. Using a Thermalright 120 Ultra Extreme CPU cooler with a 120mm fan and an Asus P5E3 Premium motherboard, we were able to easily take the chip to 4GHz and run our full suilte of benchmark test. Even overclocked, the CPU peaked at a temperature of 44 degrees Celcius at full load - and the E8400 proved a real speed demon in tasks like iTunes conversion and MPEG-2 encoding.
As far as gaming goes, the majority of today's games rely more on graphics-card performance than CPU speed. Except for the very few games that can take advantage of more than two cores (such as Microsoft Flight Simulator X and Supreme Commander), the E8400 should provide as good a basis for running today's most demanding games as a more expensive quad-core chip.
Intel does have a faster Core 2 Duo chip-the 3.16GHz E8500-but this $266 chip adds a large price premium for a mere 166MHz of additional speed. Overall, the Core 2 Duo E8400 is an impressive value.

source: Computer Shopper August, 2008.
www.intel.com