2800Mhz Showdown:

First comparison of the day is between the two low end stock CPU's. Both are running 266FSB with a 10.5 multiplier, resulting in a solid 2800mhz. This is performance out of the box here, nothing more and surely nothing less.

We start off with SuperPi and Wprime. The first test loving every ounce of bandwidth and cache it can get, the second test Wprime is CPU speed pur sang.



SuperPi 1mb and Wprime 32 are very close it seems at first sight. Though overclockers are aware that to nibble them precious hundreds of a second, it requires a few 100 mhz in pure CPU speed. Clear win for the slightly larger cached E7400. Don't let the small differences fool ya !



Differences in cache are getting more apparent with a few second gap in favour again of the E7400. I'm talking cache again as the Everest Ram bandwidth results below are so close. For your info I always did each test 3 times and took the average score. Each test was executed after a fresh reboot. This to optimise the OS environment and to avoid residues in the cache or co.



Nothing to see here, it seems at these speeds the extra cache on the CPU brings nothing for the Rams.



Winrar seems to take great benefit of the extra cache. The software code needs to adress it properly, to get the most out of it... same rule counts for the multi core CPU's. If the application isn't properly coded it will not reflect in better performance.



Moving on to PCMark05 and Cinebench. For PCMark05, when looking at the end results and into each test seperately, the extra cache gives a nice boost in each CPU dependant test. Cinebench results too give slightly better results for the E7400, though when looking at the total time it was required to render the bike, the difference was less than a few seconds.

3dmark 2001 and 2006 up next :



3Dmark 2001 is so dependant on cache and bandwith (One of the reasons of course why I included this benchmark) Performance boost when running clock for clock is huge. Does this reflect in the newer 06 ?



CPU score in 3Dmark06 is close. Total score however indicates that the extra cache gives that nice little extra.



Let's stop the Synthetic stuff and compare the 3 Games. Each game tested here gets that little boost in average FPS. Take note that with the GTX 285, the maximum FPS results were sometimes miles apart. But average or minimum FPS is where it counts in my humble opinion. These 3 games love cache, but if it's visible to the human eye that's another thing.