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In the X3: Reunion test the E6400 was just 7% slower than the E6700 at 1280x1024, which worked out to be just 6fps. The E6400 was on the other hand 9% faster than the E6300, which proves the Core 2 Duo needs to be operating at over 2GHz to be efficient enough to support a speedy videocard like the Radeon X1900XTX in our test rig.
Still, amazingly the E6300 was a blistering 22% faster than the 3.40GHz Pentium D 950 processor. It's been a long time since a new Intel processor shined so much in a gaming test.
Despite the E6300 lacking somewhat in the X3: Reunion test quite the opposite was found in Quake 4, as the E6300 delivered almost identical performance to that of the E6400. In fact, the 2MB L2 Cache processors are not all that much slower than the high-end 4MB L2 Cache processors. What is impressive is that the slowest Core 2 Duo processor, being the E6300, was 33% faster than the Pentium D 950 processor.
As you can see, UT2004 does drop quite a number of frames when moving from the E6700 backwards. The E6600 is just 8% slower than the E6700, whereas the E6400 is 12% slower than the E6600. Then the E6300 is another 12% slower than the E6400.
These results show similar margins and scalability per MHz as in our synthetic benchmarks. No surprise anymore to have the E6300 performing considerably faster than the Pentium D 950 processor.
Prey is the latest and greatest game to surface using the Doom 3 engine and unlike Quake 4 it has created some serious bottlenecks. As a result the fastest Core 2 Duo processor, being the E6700, is just 13% faster than the Pentium D 950.
These results are more graphics card limited than the previous ones, however the relevance of them is not affected because the graphics detail/resolution used for testing resembles the one typically used for real gaming.
