It was back in July 2006 when we got our first look at the then brand new Core 2 Duo processor technology. The processor code-named 'Conroe' was initially released in four different flavors ranging from the E6300 (1.86GHz) all the way up to the E6700 model running at 2.66GHz, and from the get go we knew Intel had a winner on its hands.

But for sometime now we've been waiting for Intel to move on to a more efficient and highly hyped 45nm fabrication technology, which was released just last month. The new 45nm Wolfdale line-up includes the E8200 (2.66GHz), E8400 (3.00GHz) and E8500 (3.16GHz) processors that are expected to operate at lower temperatures - and thus reduce fan noise - as well as receive newer SSE4.1 instructions and ship with a larger 6MB L2 cache.

It should not take pages of benchmark results to convince you that the E8500 is a better buy than the E6850 as that clearly is the case. However, those currently in possession of an E6000 series processor or even older Intel or AMD processors, may still be quite interested to see how much faster these new E8000 series CPUs are, and if they are worth upgrading to. The non-race is on then!

http://www.techspot.com/review/85-in...ale-vs-conroe/

Please leave your feedback here. Thanks!

One question. Wouldn't it be better to judge the CPUs' gaming performance by running the games at the lowest resolutions possible? That would put most of the load onto the CPU right?

That is partially correct, but who plays at low resolutions if they have a brand new Core 2 Duo CPU and a GeForce 8800 GTX? If you see our results every game except Crysis was running in the 90-100s FPS!

So basically our gaming tests in this article give you a real outlook of what performance difference you will see in a real gaming setting.

We could have skewed the results by running at 1024x768, for example, but what will that tell you? IMHO, absolutely nothing

Makes sense. Thanks for the explanation and the article.
BTW, will you be reviewing the Phenom X3 (when it releases) versus the Wolfdale CPUs?

Yes, hopefully we will be reviewing both Phenoms X2s and X3s as soon as they are out.