Core 2 Duo E8600 Review

It turned out that the new CPU has a pretty impressive frequency reserve. Up to 3.9GHz our processor remained absolutely stable. It means that there must be primarily marketing rather than technological reasons for Intel to set 3.33GHz as the default frequency for their new processor. This way Intel will be able to release even faster dual-core CPUs. However, we can hardly expect Intel to speed up its dual-core family any more considering that they focus mainly on quad-core CPUs at this time and besides, there is no competition on AMD’s part. According to Intel’s current plans, Core 2 Duo E8600 will remain the top model in the family for the rest of its life.

The frequencies we managed to achieve during our Core 2 Duo E8600 overclocking experiments indicated clearly that the new E0 processor stepping also features higher frequency potential. The Wolfdale processors with previous C0 stepping overclocked in exact same conditions to about 4.4GHz. The new CPU, the first processor on E0 stepping that we have tested so far, managed to hit more than 150MHz higher frequency.