Intel Core 2 Duo E4300: Affordable and Highly Overclockable
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 10, 2007 2:45 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
General Performance
Overall system performance, measured using SYSMark 2004SE, places the default clocked E4300 at within 4% of the performance of the E6300. Obviously the release of the E6320 will widen this gap but E6300-level performance is nothing to balk at, given the price point of this chip what we're looking at is nothing short of stellar.
Overclocked, the E4300 truly shines - outpacing the X6800 by a marginal 3.3%. The margin of victory is well within the variance for SYSMark but the point to take home is that we're looking at an overclocked $163 chip, delivering performance equal to a CPU priced at six times its cost.
Internet Content Creation performance reflects what we saw in the overall score - the E4300 is within striking distance of the E6300, and of course faster than AMD's Athlon 64 X2 3800+. When overclocked, the E4300 can give you better performance than a X6800, this time coming in 11% faster.
The Office Productivity suite changes things a bit; while the E4300 continues to perform similarly to the E6300, when overclocked it's still slower than the X6800 despite the clock speed advantage. There are many applications and usage models that will end up favoring more cache over a higher clock speed, and that's where the E4300 will lose out to its more expensive alternatives. At the end of the day, it's still a great value, but keep in mind that the smaller cache will limit maximum performance in some areas.
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dubrov - Sunday, February 11, 2007 - link
WHY IN ARTICLE PICTURE I SEE:VOLTAGE = 1.213 v
WHILE THE TEXT BELOW THE PICTURE STATES:
VOLTAGE = 1.468 V
Which one is true?
P.S. Bought E4300 yesterday - it DOES NOT POST on FSB > 325 MHz at a default voltage.
Is it safe to raise the voltage up to 1.5 V (won't it burn the core2 before the temperature sensor reacts)?
penga - Sunday, February 4, 2007 - link
E4300 is the n1 competitor to the X2 EE SFF Series regarding power/performance-efficiency, so why would u not include at least an X2 3800 EE SFF or an 4000+ 65nm in ur tests?coolme - Friday, February 2, 2007 - link
Overall, this is a great review. The really throughly explained the advantages, and the disadvantages of the E4300. (Basically an underclocked E6700 that's doesn't have virtualization, and E4400 will have a x10 multiplier) I just wanted to say thanks, and note a minor typo in the review.In page 7, power consumption the paragraph between the 2 charts "Overclocked, the E6300 uses a bit more power than the X6800 but that’s to be expected.". It's the E4300 that's overclocked, not E6300.
Thanks, and keep up the good work!
lapierrem - Friday, January 19, 2007 - link
I am surprised, that I have not yet seen a single one of these up on ebay yet.What gives? Release something awesome but don't actually put any stock out there...and make everyone wait and the price go up...
Yongsta - Sunday, January 14, 2007 - link
Looks good, can't wait I've been holding on my next upgrade for something like this. Initially I had a Celeron 300 ($100) which I overclocked to 500 mhz+ and outperformed P4 450 ($650). Next upgrade was both Barton 2500 ($90) overclocked to past Barton 3200 speeds & P4 2.4c ($170) at 3.6 ghz. All my purchases were best bang for the buck (including video cards in the past with hacks to enable disabled pipelines, etc) and in this chip it looks like I can get it again.aznskickass - Thursday, January 11, 2007 - link
The overclocked performance of the E4300 @ 3.37GHz looks very low IMO.Anandtech - are you sure the E4300 was not throttling at this point? I would assume 3.37GHz/1.475V on the stock HSF would get pretty hot, possibly hot enough to trigger CPU throttling.
just4U - Saturday, January 13, 2007 - link
Some one mentioned here that a 3Ghz C2D value chip will walk all over Amd's Budgit X2's running at 1.8- 2.0G.I sort of found that a rather odd comment to make. Many enthusiast's look at these chips for overclock potential so.. chances are you wouldnt be dealing with a stock X2 either.
I kinda wish they had the 3800 overclocked as well so we could get a look at both of them and compare it on a more level playing field. Granted the C2D would still walk all over the amd chip but it would be interesting to see the results.
cmdrdredd - Thursday, January 11, 2007 - link
Where is the clock for clock comparisons? E4300 @ same speed as like an E6400 (overclock both to like 3Ghz) and test. That will let us really see if it's worth spending the extra cash for the E6300/6400.harpoon84 - Thursday, January 11, 2007 - link
The E4300 is slightly faster than the X2 4200+ overall - go ahead, count how many the E4300 wins, and how many the X2 4200+ wins. The E4300 wins the count 8 - 3, although those numbers are a bit misleading as most of the time the margins between the chips are very close.In terms of price/performance, the $163 pricetag is justified, but I still prefer it at the Q2 price of $113! ;)
Xcom1Cheetah - Thursday, January 11, 2007 - link
Look pretty tempting but i think it is priced a little higher likeFirstly it look like as is it a high end Core 2 Celeron (with lower FSB and half the cache BUT 2 cores). So it should be priced in between Celeron and Core 2 Territory.
Secondly its performance overall at stock speed is between X2 3800+ and X2 4200+.. The 3800+ is going for 133 and 4200+ is for 169... (i m talking about newegg prices)
So it should be priced like around US $150 at most in my view... and around 3800+ price to give AMD even more tough time.:) but not more than US $150 in any case.
Just my view..