Which Windows Is best on Core2 duo ?

Despite the victorious procession of processors performed by LGA1156 on the computers of many users, the good old LGA775 socket is not going to give up yet. Of course, in the top segment of the market, these processors have nothing to do – compared to Core i5 / i7, they ceased to be fully competitive. However, it accounts for a rather low volume of sales, but in the more massive segments among Intel products there are no alternatives to the “old” Core 2 Duo and younger Core 2 Quad models – the dual-core Core i3 / i5 and Pentium will enter the market only in January. Then it will take some time to wait for the saturation of the trading network with these models, then the mass appearance of inexpensive motherboards (in principle, they already exist, however, for the past six months, for obvious reasons, manufacturers have focused on top models) .

Yes, and many do not like to clutch at new products, at the risk of getting burned, preferring simple and time-tested solutions. In addition, many users already have systems based on LGA775 processors, so they are more attracted to the possibility of a “little blood upgrade” than the idea of a total platform change. Therefore, even if these processors are no longer of interest for research, it is nevertheless necessary to test them. At least in order to fully compare with the expected news 🙂 even if these processors are no longer of interest for research, we still need to test them. At least in order to fully compare with the expected news 🙂 even if these processors are no longer of interest for research, we still need to test them. At least in order to fully compare with the expected news 🙂

The last time we addressed the topic of Core 2 Quad was in late August, and some representatives of the Core 2 Duo and Pentium families were tested in mid-October. Some, but not all – in particular, we were not able to get the senior C2D, namely the E8600. The Pentium line also managed to be updated through the release of the Pentium E6500, which came close to the magic mark of 3 GHz, once accessible only to overclockers or buyers of extreme processors (for example, Core 2 Extreme X6800differed from our hero only in the technical process, TDP and cache capacity). The Pentium E6600 expected in the first quarter of next year will generally exceed this line, on which, apparently, it will put an end to the development of this line. In the same way that the E7600 and E8600 (the latter – exactly, the former – with a 90% probability) closed their lineups.

The Core 2 Quad line has also been updated, although it can be regarded as a step back. On the other hand, the C2Q Q9505 also risks soon remaining the fastest in the family – more productive models are equipped with a 12 MB L2 cache, which is very expensive to manufacture, but they lose to the more technologically advanced Core i5 750. Obviously, not residents 🙂 The new processor would be more logical to call the Q9500, however, the company preferred such an original version, emphasizing that the novelty differs from the already long-released Q9550 only in reduced cache memory. Well, at a price, of course. So today, in fact, we have the “swan song” of processors under LGA775 – a test of the tops.

In general, everything has already been said about the main characters – together with the Core 2 Duo E7600 tested last time (which we decided to include among the main participants) these are the tops of the respective families. Someone has already taken this place, someone has yet to do it, and most processors will go into oblivion unsurpassed 🙂

The selection of processors for comparison also did not constitute special problems. Obviously, Q9550, the closest analog of Q9505, could not help but enter it. We could not ignore the Q8200 – the cheapest Intel quad-core processor. And finally, the Core i5 750 – it appears somewhat “out of competition” (although not quite – the price is comparable with some participants), but it’s quite suitable for the role of the “upper bar”: you can immediately assess whether it makes sense to stay committed to the old platform or it’s time to migrate already.

AMD’s “guests from the camp” are also three today. Intel’s “family” turned out to be very mottled, so we decided not to select competitors in terms of price and other positioning, but to confine ourselves to already well-studied representatives of the budget Athlon II family: X2 250, X3 435 and X4 630, which are also peculiar “tops” rulers. The first two are designed to discourage potential consumers from buying Celeron, Pentium, or the younger Core 2 Duo, while the latter line is very peculiar: the cheapest quad-core processors that do not have direct analogs in the Intel range. But nobody bothers us to compare all the named processors, so we will do it. It would be possible to add to this group various “Phenomas”, fortunately, even the oldest model of this family (Phenom II X4 965), after the last price reduction, turned out to be a competitor to the “semi-budget” Q9505, but we will not do this in order not to increase the charts to an absolutely indecent form. All the results, traditionally, are in our table, but for those who prefer the traditional graphical form of presenting information, we will make a corresponding gift without detailed comments (certainly not later than the “old” New Year).

Despite the fact that the transition to DDR3 is the mainstream of the computer industry, and for some DDR2 processors it is already physically impossible to use, this time we decided to step back a bit and Core 2 Quad Q9505 to test and together with DDR2. The fact is that we did not test the Q9550 with DDR3, but we need to compare these processors in the most close conditions (and the Q9300, which is a kind of benchmark for the current version of the technique, was previously tested only in conjunction with DDR2). Along the way, we will also examine another interesting question: the influence of different types of memory on performance in real applications. The FSB 1333 frequency here is just the most interesting: since DDR2 stopped at a slightly lower level, formally DDR3 gets a slight advantage in bandwidth. The fact that it cannot be put into practice,

Testing:

The performance testing methodology (list of used software and testing conditions) is described in detail in the article . For ease of perception, the results on the diagrams are presented in percent (the result of Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 in each of the tests is taken as 100%). Detailed results in absolute values are available in table format in Microsoft Excel format .

3D visualization:

Nobody gives the opportunity to expand “at full strength” to the quad-core processors, so it is not surprising that high-frequency dual-core processors are the best choice. This is especially true for the Core 2 Duo E8600, where the frequency of the cores and cache, and the volume of the latter too, are very high. But the E7600 against the background of the E6500 does not look very good: the difference between 2 and 3 MB of cache is not radical, but the frequencies in these families are getting closer and closer to each other.

That’s when the cache capacity is twice as different (as in the Q9505 and Q9550), at least something can be said. Although it can be seen that the contribution of the twofold difference in the cache capacity at the same frequency is only equal to the introduced pair from the increase in cache by megabytes and the frequency by 133 MHz in younger models. DDR3 results worsen but insignificantly – against the general background, the difference between the types of memory can be considered insignificant. For obvious reasons, AMD Athlon II processors are losers here even if we compare them with Pentium – additional cores do not give anything, and there is not enough cache memory.