E8500: Close-Up



The white box means this IS an engineering sample on our desk. Strangely enough, this does not look at all as an engineering sample, it really looks like a normal retail processor.



In the white box, we find of course the CPU and, I almost missed it, a disturbingly small heatsink. These are the heatsinks you normally find in the “Celeron” versions of the C2D-series, but now these are ought to hold the load of a high-end 45nm chip, amazing isn't it! To give you an impression of how small the heatsink is, I took a picture of the aluminum cooling system next to my ballpoint.



Last but not least, the CPU itself.



The stepping makes me (and the entire crew of OC-Team.BE) wonder if this is a good sample to overclock or not. Q738 is quite an early stepping and early samples are known for their moderate overclocks. We'll find out what this chip is capable of, further on this review.

Test setup

Intel Test Setup
CPU	Intel Core 2 E6300 Intel Core 2 E8500
Cooling	Stock Aluminum Intel Heatsink nVentiv Mach2 Phase-Change Liquid Nitrogen
Mainboard	DFI Lanparty UT P35-T2R
Memory	2 * 512MB Transcand PC-6400
Other	Sparkle Calibre 8600GT 512MB (drivers FW 171.16) Tagan 480W PSU Western Digital 320Gb SATA HDD Windows XP SP2 Dutch

Methodology

To compare all motherboards, we used the following benchmarks:

SuperPi 1M/32M

Hexus Pifast

Wprime 32M/1024M

Prey

SiSoft Sandra 2007: CPU drystone and whetstone benchmark

Aquamark

3DMark06 including CPU test

Cinebench 10

Winrar

Techarp X264 benchmark

All tests were run on six different test setups:

E6300 default: 1862Mhz (266x7)

E6300 OC: 3500Mhz (500x7)

E8500 default: 3164Mhz (333x9,5)

E8500 OC1: 3500Mhz (500x7)

E8500 OC2: 4465Mhz (470x9,5 - Max overclock with Air Cooling)

E8500 OC3: 5206Mhz (548x9,5 - Max overclock with Subzero Mach2 Cooling)



The fifth frequency we listed is the maximum stable overclock using an Intel stock cooler and 1,39v, interesting for those who don't plan to change CPU cooling but like to overclock.