Conclusive Thoughts

Intel and AMD have been “at it” the last 12 months, trying to win over the customer with faster processors at lower prices. This competition has brought us gems as this E2160 processor, which in our tests kept on par with the E6300 model. Available in stores at ~€80 you’d wouldn’t be making a mistake to build a budget system based around this CPU.

At default speeds it’s true that this model is a low-end part, lacking the required Mhz “oomph” to keep up with the high end units, but it has a nice trick up its sleeve, the lower FSB (and hence the higher multiplier) is a blessing for those willing to wander into the overclocking area. You don’t need an expensive motherboard to go with this CPU, any Intel P965, P35 DDR2, NVIDIA or ATI powered board will do, as long as they can reach ~350Mhz FSB (which should not be a problem). My E2160 sample was not hand picked, and reached 3Ghz easily with stock settings, to get to 3.3Ghz I had to increase vcore by a measly 0.05v. Temperature wise the stock Intel cooling was sufficient, with load temperatures never reaching disturbing heights.

If you don’t want to experiment with overclocking and want out of the box performance, the E2160 doesn’t do bad either, while it lags the more expensive E6300 is some areas (file/audio/video compression) in others it’s pretty much on par (games). Intel is phasing out the E6300 model for a newer one, the E6320 which features 4Mb L2 cache, the retail price for that one is ~€140, which is not a bad deal of course, but still features the low 7x multiplier.

In the budget Core 2 Duo area you now have 4 models to choose from, all are priced within ~€50 of each other, CPU speeds are practically identical, only thing changing is FSB and L2 cache.

E2160 – 1800Mhz – 200FSB – 9x – 1Mb L2

E4300 – 1800Mhz – 200FSB – 9x – 2Mb L2

E6300 – 1866Mhz – 266FSB – 7x – 2Mb L2

E6320 – 1866Mhz – 266FSB – 7x – 4Mb L2

It’s safe to say that Intel will be eliminating the E4300/E6300 as their own products are now competing with each other instead of the AMD processors. Choosing between the E2160 and E6320 becomes a matter of personal preference.

Do you want the best performance out of the box and don’t mind to spend a bit more? E6320 shall be yours. Not afraid to tweak the BIOS to get higher CPU speeds? E2160 will give you a very good price/performance deal.

Most say overclocking is a hit and miss situation, I can’t agree more, however a nifty search&compare tool at HWbot does allow us to get an idea of the average overclocking potential of these chips:


With an average overclock of 3.6Ghz the E2160 doesn’t disappoint, reaching the speed of 3Ghz will almost be a guarantee and your system with €80 CPU will run only marginally slower compared to one with an expensive Core 2 X6800 inside.

Thank you all for reading; hope this comparison will help you make an informed choice if you’re building a new system on a budget.