Core 2 Duo E7200 vs E6300

POWER USAGE & OVERCLOCKING

As mentioned earlier in the Sandra section, I was able to get the power draw of each CPU from that software. Keep in mind that this is while at full load during the benchmarks.

Here is what I came up with:

In both cases we see the chipset and memory drawing the same amount of power. It is nice to see only 28.9W being drawn by the RAM and the mighty X48. The E7200 draws 8.1W less than the E6300 in each case. So we see that the smaller 45nm process does in fact reduce power usage.

Now on to everybody’s favourite part … overclocking. As I mentioned before, Core 2 Duos in general, have incredible overclocking headroom. The E6300 was able to boot into Windows at an amazing 3.4GHz (486×7) but couldn’t be made stable. The highest stable speed that was achieved was 3.22GHz (460×7), which is an overclock of 1.54GHz or 82.8%.

On the other hand, the E7200 was able to boot into Windows at 4GHz (422×9.5) but couldn’t be made stable. The highest stable speed that was achieved was 3.8GHz (400×9.5), which is an overclock of 1.27GHz or 50.2%. This overclock was achieved rather easily and presents a robust platform on which to work or play. If I do however get it stable at a higher frequency I will update this article but I think I’m content with 3.8GHz for now.