Is Core 2 Duo really worth it?

[hurtstotalktoyou]

I recently bought an E6300 and Gigabyte 965P series board as had been continually suggested on this board prior to the release of the E4300. I now have my E6300 overclocked to 2.8GHz on stock voltage and stock cooling, and all is running smoothly--but not particularly fast. In fact, after running some benchmarks, I am extremely disappointed with my performance. To be honest, it isn't much better than my old Sempron 2800+. If that sounds absurd, well, you can imagine my own disappointment, given that I paid over $400 for this upgrade.

Here are my initial benchmark results:

SYSTEM ONE:
Sempron 64 2800+ @ 2.32 GHz, ~1.62v, FSB290, HT-870, 1GB DDR-333 @ 387 (2.5-3-3-7/1T), 64MB AGP GeForce4 MX 420, Epox EP-8KDA3J, PATA/100 WD400EB

SYSTEM TWO:
Core 2 Duo E6300 @ 1.86 GHz (stock), 1GB DDR2-533, 64MB/256MB Biostar GeForce 6200TC V6202TS63, Gigabyte GA-965P-S3, Seagate 80GB 7200.7 SATA/150

TEST METHODS:
1. encode 54:33 (550MB) CD-quality WAV audio to FLAC level 8 using DMC 10
2. encode a 696MB CloneCD CD-ROM image to RAR (best compression) using WinRAR 3
3. encode a 42:01 (351MB) DivX video to DVD-compatible MPEG-1 "low resolution" using TMPGEnc Plus 2 (this is the only software that has a specific setting for multi-core awareness, which of course was used for the C2D test)

RESULTS (Sempron / Core 2 Duo):
FLAC 251 sec. / 244 sec. (2.9% improvement)
WINRAR 476 sec. / 443 sec. (7.4% improvement)
TMPGEnc 1,354 sec. / 1,211 sec. (11.8% improvement)

When I first posted these results, I was accused of a variety of errors, but I assure you I have been very careful. I am about to run some different tests, including results for the C2D @ 2.8GHz.

I would now like some suggestions on further benchmarks.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Markfw]

so with a almost 25% difference in speed, it still beats the sempron in mostly disk intensive tasks ? and most people can get the 6300 to 3.2-3.4 with a mild vcore increase, and you haven;t benched that yet...

You will see that the C2D@3.4 is twice (in cpu power) what a X2@2.5 is, and those are the best OC's I can get on air with several of each, average OC's.

 

[myocardia]

Well, I'm thinking you could make that Sempron considerably faster in those apps, if you'd just use RAID 0 Raptors in the Sempron system, and a 4200 RPM laptop harddrive in the C2D system. That still doesn't make the Sempron anywhere near as fast, though.

 

[nyker96]

I am thinking, could the tests has so much disk access that the CPU time becomes distorted? because if you look at Tom's CPU chart, C2D 6400 (2.1) is way ahead in benches compare to say a 2.4 A64 single core in stuff like winrar (50% faster etc). So if you scale it up to say 2.8 C2D vs. 2.4 A64 single core this lead should go further than 50% may even be close to 80%. In anycase I think your observed results are correct just maybe something is distorting the CPU portion of the result.

 

[Hulk]

Wow I'm amazed that the Core 2 Duo can give up 500MHz and still beat the Sempron.

I'm more amazed by the C2D's every day.

Thanks for posting the benchmark scores.

 

[traderonline]

C2D has more cache memory than Sempron. It should increase your overall common PC tasks. When you check Tomshardware CPU charts Semprons are way behind at the bottom of the chart

 

[3chordcharlie]

Originally posted by: traderonline
C2D has more cache memory than Sempron. It should increase your overall common PC tasks. When you check Tomshardware CPU charts Semprons are way behind at the bottom of the chart

The sempron 2800 is one of the few with the 256k cache, which certainly wouldn't hurt in these tests.

But I really have to wonder if these benchmarks are really testing the sempron @2.3ghz against the Seagate 80GB 7200.7 SATA/150 hard drive in the other system.

Now having two hard drives in a system is both an inconvenience (for a laptop user) and an expense, but there are certainly non-I/O limited tasks at which the C2D will kill the sempron.

The moral of the story though, is that for general purpose computing, a decent single core processor is still quite fine.

 

[BlingBlingArsch]

Originally posted by: Hulk
Wow I'm amazed that the Core 2 Duo can give up 500MHz and still beat the Sempron.

I'm more amazed by the C2D's every day.

Thanks for posting the benchmark scores.

compare it to a X2 5000+ and they will be on par. even pricewise.

 

[Aberforth]

Athlon X2's are not power friendly.

X2 5000 - 102 W
Core 2 Duo E6700 - 78W

@ 100% CPU usage, Stock speed

 

[BlingBlingArsch]

ur confused its the other way around, X2 are more power friendly ;-)

 

[Aberforth]

Originally posted by: BlingBlingArsch
ur confused its the other way around, X2 are more power friendly ;-)

find out yourself here - it usually shows accurate power consumption.

 

[BlingBlingArsch]

 

[3NF]

Up until Core 2 Duo, I always used AMD. I would say it is really worth it

 

[KDKPSJ]

Originally posted by: Aberforth

Originally posted by: BlingBlingArsch
ur confused its the other way around, X2 are more power friendly ;-)

find out yourself here - it usually shows accurate power consumption.

Much more informative and accurate.

 

[Hulk]

Originally posted by: BlingBlingArsch

Originally posted by: Hulk
Wow I'm amazed that the Core 2 Duo can give up 500MHz and still beat the Sempron.

I'm more amazed by the C2D's every day.

Thanks for posting the benchmark scores.

compare it to a X2 5000+ and they will be on par. even pricewise.

That is true and they would be on par IF you could easily overclock the X2 5000+ to 3.2-3.4GHz. But you cannot so they are not on par.

 

[BlingBlingArsch]

this is why i keep sayin and prayin: If u are not an ocer ur free to chose between 5000+ and e6300/e6400 IF u want to oc like so many ppl do these days then E6xxx or E4xxx will still be the safest bet.

 

[mithrandir2001]

FLAC and RAR "prefer" clock speed to core design improvements; they also don't need much cache. Being single-threaded they use only "half" of the C2D. Your results appear reasonable here.

Your TMPGEnc results are more questionable. Are both C2D cores being fully utilized? Even though it is multi-core aware, it may not be using both cores fully. I use AutoGK 2.4 for XviD encoding and it will peg my E6300 to 100%.

Also remember that during your single-threaded FLAC and RAR tests, your C2D has plenty of unused power in "reverse" to perform other tasks. Being able to do multiple CPU-intensive tasks at the same time is a benefit to dual cores that don't show up in tests of single-threaded apps.

 

[Hulk]

Originally posted by: BlingBlingArsch

Originally posted by: Hulk
Wow I'm amazed that the Core 2 Duo can give up 500MHz and still beat the Sempron.

I'm more amazed by the C2D's every day.

Thanks for posting the benchmark scores.

compare it to a X2 5000+ and they will be on par. even pricewise.

Actually the E6400 is comparable with the X2 5200+ pricewise.

But alas, the E6400 even at stock speed is the better performing processor.

E6400 vs. 5200+ Benchmarks