2010 Notes:
I use the Intel E8400 Duo Core Core 2 (Socket T) processors in (2) of my machines. The reason I use these particular cpu's in the systems are simple: SPEED vs. COST vs. FUNCTIONALITTY!
There are faster cpu's available now, of course, but these E8400's are "FAST AS HELL" and are extremely Overclockable. They can easily be pushed to 4.0GHz on AIR COOLING, no liquid cooling required. Thats FAST! And they are stable and reliable. And they are priced right at about $170.00 each in 2010. They can push over 4.0GHz with liquid cooling. They are a Socket LGA 775 type processor are they are quickly becoming hard to find and buy new in 2010. As we all know, the Intel Socket LGA 775 Core 2 has been discontinued and surpassed by the newer Intel Socket LGA 1156 (socket H) and Intel Socket LGA 1366 (Socket B). As of October 2010 this E8400 cpu is still available from NewEgg and TigerDirect but there are limited quantities left.
Technical Information; Intel E8400 Duo Core Core 2 (Socket T)
With the Wolfdale core Intel pours more power into a Core 2 Duo package. The 45nm process allowed Intel to reduce the power needed to 65W. Lower power means lower CPU heat, which translates to lower system heat and longer system life. They also packed more features into the chip.
L2 cache has been bumped to 6MB and the Front Side Bus has been pushed to 1333MHz. You can now use both DDR2 and the hot new DDR3 memory for extreme performance. They also boosted memory access and execution speed with the Wide Dynamic Execution and Smart Memory Access. These combine to let the processor compute more instructions with more data per clock cycle.
The Advanced Digital Media Boost feature has been enhanced with the addition of the SSE4 instruction set and Intel HD Boost. This will give your entertainment experience a boost with better audio and video processing. It will also help with speech recognition, engineering and scientific applications. Perhaps most important of all will be the boost to security with increased encryption power and speed.
Intel's Core 2 Duo lineup of processors have been extremely popular thanks to their strong performance and excellent power profiles. The industry is pushing more for quad processors, but most applications still aren't optimized for using multiple cores. This is where the advantage of the Core 2 Duo lineup shines thanks to its higher clock speeds.
The Core 2 Duo E8400 was one of the first of Intel's 45nm processor lineup. The smaller traces allow the processor to use less power and reduce heat generation. The additional space on the die allows the cache to increase from the previous 4MB of the E6000 series to 6MB. The E8400 uses the newer 1333MHz bus speed to help it transfer data between subsystems faster than the 1066MHz cores. All of this add up to a very fast processor that comes in at a very reasonable price.
Overall, performance in all applications was quite strong. The only area that the E8400 will really fall behind quad core CPUs is in software programs such as video editing software. In fact, many applications now seem to be limited by other aspects of the systems such as memory, hard drive or GPU where additional cores or high clock speeds won't make much of an impact.
Overclocking the Core 2 Duo E8400 is easy and yields excellent results. When testing the overclocking, the E8400 was boosted by 20% to 3.6GHz by simply modifying the bus from 1333MHz to 1600MHz. This gave a very strong boost in performance and didn't cause much issue with heat even with the stock Intel heatsink. There is room for more with the right combination of cooling and memory.
