Intel Core 2 Duo E4300: Affordable and Highly Overclockable
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 10, 2007 2:45 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Gaming Performance
Quake 4 performance is reasonably close to the E6300, but when overclocked it can't quite outpace the X6800. The X6800 manages to hold onto a 12% performance advantage even with the E4300 holding onto a clock speed advantage. At stock speeds the E4300 offers similar performance to the Athlon 64 X2 3800+.
Oblivion has always been friendlier to Intel's Core 2 architecture, and thus the E4300 has no problems outpacing the X2 3800+. Compared to the similarly priced Pentium D 945, the E4300 is significantly faster, as the Pentium D's NetBurst architecture has rarely been favored in games. Overclocked, the E4300 gets close to the X6800 but it is no faster.
Half-Life 2: Episode One echoes what we've seen from our other gaming tests - at stock speeds the E4300 is faster than the X2 3800+ and slightly slower than the E6300. When overclocked to 3.38GHz, the E4300 ends up getting close to the performance of the X6800 but it cannot surpass it due to the smaller L2 cache.
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clairvoyant129 - Friday, January 12, 2007 - link
Look again, the E4300 frags the X2 4200+bob4432 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
i just need to keep on saying to myself, i don't need to upgrade, i don't need to upgrade, i don't need to upgrade.......man, what a good time for people that are builing though, intel sure is putting as much of the smackdown on amd (currently running amd so i am not partial to either, just my wallet) as they can.
when this thing drops to $133, it will be so tempting....hoping ddr2 will drop soon!!!!!
kmmatney - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
How far can you overclock the 4300 with a DDR motherboard, so I can use the 2GB I already have? With the ASRock 775Dual-VSTA LGA 775, which usually can get to 312 MhZ FSB, you should be able to get to 2.8 Ghz, which isn't too bad. Are there any better options out there that allow you to use DDR?dm - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
http://fanboyreview.blogspot.com/2006/12/brag-one-...">http://fanboyreview.blogspot.com/2006/1...one-hund...Invader57 - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
I believe this article has the prices wrong. According to the recent Intel news release, the E4300 price will be reduced to $113 in Q2, when the E4400 is released at $133.atenza - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
Well, you're right! There's a mistake in the article.docmilo - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
I bought a cheap mb/cpu combo to get into dual core some time ago. I currently am running an 805 Pentium D in an ECS board, RC410L/800-M. I run great overclocked to 3.4 ghz from stock 2.66. This chip is only at 533 fsb. CPU-Z shows the fsb at 1500 to get this speed. I think this testing should have been done on a mb with a max 800fsb since I believe this chip is for that type of mb.What kind of OC should I expect on an 800mhz fsb motherboard?
atenza - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
Your mobo doesn't support Core 2 at all. Some improved voltage regulator is needed, having socket 775 is not enough.GeekUSA - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
Does anyone know where I can get the program that overclocks these beautiful chips?Thank You.
Toebot - Wednesday, January 10, 2007 - link
http://www.cpuid.com/clockgen.php">null