Intel E6750 Performance Preview

Intel E6750 Performance Preview:

Intro:
A few days ago the net was hit with a barrage of performance reviews of Intel’s latest stop-gap
the E6750. This CPU on the surface seems to be nothing more than an E6420 with a 1333MHz FSB and a lower TDP. But with this refresh of the Conroe line (due to the announcement of Bearlake and the native 1333MHz FSB CPUs) comes the question “Will we see any real performance increase? “
We took the time to find out.

Product: Core 2 Duo E6750
Author: Sean Kalinich
Category: Enthusiast
Reviewed on: July 7th 2007
Product cost: TBA
Manufacturer: Intel
Spelling and Grammatical editor:  Carlos Echenique, Paul Mercer

Performance:
Although this is not a full blown review of the E6750 (that will have to come later) we still wanted to give you a good look into what this newest refresh can do.  Unfortunately, I did not have an E6700 handy for comparison. I did have a QX6700 handy and pitted the E6750 against this with two cores disabled( although I had no way to confirm this I tried to make sure that both cores were using the same 4MB of cache, as the Kentsfield cannot share cache between CPU dies).. Now you will notice that there are no AMD CPUs used in this eval.That is due to a complete lack of any of the newer CPU types being available from AMD. I if you would like to see the performance numbers from the last AMD CPU we had in for testing check out our QX6700 and Core 2 Duo reviews.Testing was broken down into two main groups, synthetic tests and gaming performance. Over Clocking will be covered later.

The results of my testing are listed below.
The test system was:
Intel Core 2 Quad QX6700 (with cores two and three disabled)
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750
eVGA 680i SLI Mainboard
Foxconn FV-N88XMAD2-ON GeForce 8800GTX 768MB
Corsair CM2X1024 8500C5 (2GB running at 1066MHz)
2x Western Digital 76GB 10k RPM Raptors (Non RAID)
PC Power & Cooling Turbo Cool T1KE-4E 1KW PSU
Corsair Nautilus 500 external water cooler for CPU.

(a word on the eVGA 680i SLI mainboard, This is the original reference board sent out by nVidia. I have never truly been able to get it to run stable. I used it for this test only because it was available and with a BIOS update saw the E6750′s 1333FSB natively. Although I feel the times and scores here are accurate some margin for error should be allowed due to the instability of the platform.)

Synthetics:
3DMark06:

As you can see the E6750 performs slightly better in 3DMark06. This is due to the faster CPU and increased bus speed.

PCMark05:

PCMark05, in Vista x64, enjoyed a larger performance gain as many of the tests in this suite are heavily CPU/Memory related.

POVRay:

Here the E6750 come out on top in Vista x64 but the Qx6700 manages to beat it in Vista x86.
CineBench 9.5:

In Cinebench 9.5 the performance gain is very slim but still there.

SuperPi Mod:

Time in Minutes and Seconds

Time in Minutes and Seconds

Time in Seconds

Time in Seconds

Well with SuperPi there is not much difference. In some places the E6750 wins by a hair but in others the Q6700 takes it.

Divx encoding:
Adding this under the synthetic benchmarks may seem odd but since this was a static test with a test DVD I did not feel it would be a true real-world test.

I used Auto Gordian Knot for my encoding and ran a movie that I authored for  a company I did some work for as my test DVD.

Time in hours:minutes:seconds

Gaming:

All games were run at minimal graphical settings and at 1024×768. This was to remove the GPU from the performance of the system as much as possible.
Need for Speed Carbon:

Need For Speed Carbon was a trade off, but the performance difference was minimal in both cases.

F.E.A.R.:

Wow, here we see a whole 2 frame difference. I am beginning to feel there is no performance gain to be had for gaming, but there are two more tests to run.DiRT:

Well this test again shows no major performance gain to be had by jumping to the 1333MHz FSB CPU.

HalfLife 2 Episode 1

Last test…

Well except for the 10 frame difference in Vista x64 with HalfLife 2 Episode 1 there really is no gaming performance gain to be found.

Conclusion (Sort of):

The numbers here do not show a huge difference. I would suspect that if you have an E6700 already you would not see a huge performance increase… However, that is not to say the E6750 is not a good move for Intel as where this piece of silicon shines is when you push it. We will be following up this performance preview with some overclocking results.