Core2 Duo E8500

Is this chip a budget winner or a sore also-ran to its Quad buddies? Josh Collins knows...

Over the last few issues we’ve seen the new 45nm quad core processors from Intel pass through the labs – these were the QX9650, QX9770 and QX9775. With the big boys now having gone their merry way, we decided it was time to look at a chip that will not only have strong gaming performance but that is within the more common price range of the average Atomic reader.

Going for a smooth price around the $361 mark, at the time of print, the E8500 represents another step in the evolution of the Core 2 Duo range. The new E8000-series of chips sees the introduction of the 45nm manufacturing process in a dual core processor format. The new chips maintain the same stock 333MHz FSB (1,333MHz quad pumped) as was introduced in the E6x50-series processors but introduces the SSE4 instruction set to the fray – great news for anyone heavily into video and audio encoding and decoding.

As to testing, the most interesting thing about this chip is what the ‘every-man’ can achieve with this newcomer from Intel while maintaining a performance spec system. To do this we paired the processor with an ASUS P5E3 Deluxe – as used in the QX9770 review – and a set of Corsair Dominator DDR3-1800 C7 memory, and cooled the CPU using a Noctua NH-U12P heatsink.

First up, it was necessary to set a base level for comparison; to do so we ran through the benchmark suites with the processor running at the stock settings of 333MHz FSB with a 9.5x multiplier resulting in a 3.16GHz end frequency. The next step from here was to test the maximum FSB. To do this we dropped the multiplier to the lowest available, 6x, and got on our way, making incremental steps upward in the FSB frequency before we either hit an FSB wall or instability occurred.

The end result was a maximum FSB frequency of 560MHz on this particular platform – considerably higher than its quad core brethren the QX9770, which managed a 475MHz maximum FSB. This large difference between the dual core and quad core FSB is not that surprising, with similar differences occurring between the E6000-series dual core and Q6000-series quad cores.

After the issues we had in the DDR3 memory roundup while using this processor on P35 based motherboards – check out the feature on page 32 for further info – we investigated the issue and found we weren’t the only ones finding poor FSB overclocking on the newer chipsets and that, surprisingly, the best overclocks were being had on older P965-based motherboards; there are massive FSB overclocks being achieved on legendary P965 boards such as the ASUS P5B Deluxe and Commando. Team.AU’s own dinos22, pro and moloko recently took an E8500 as far as 590MHz FSB with a 9.5x multiplier resulting in a 5.6GHz overclock on an old school P5B Deluxe – what stopped them from going further? An FSB wall was hit and could not be exceeded; the chip hit this insane speed on as little as 1.67v under liquid nitrogen cooling.

Having found our maximum FSB we started to push the boundaries with where this chip could go under an enthusiast level third party air based heatsink – we used the Noctua NH-U12P for this part of the testing. Doing so, we stayed on the maximum multiplier of 9.5 and cranked the FSB frequency. After some time tweaking and stepping through the FSB ranges we finished with a maximum CPU frequency validation of 4.8GHz – on air! Lowering the CPU frquency by 300MHz was required to achieve full system stability to maintain our benchmarking suite, though. None the less, 4.5GHz on an air-based cooling solution is nothing to be upset about and further demonstrates the ridiculous ability the new Intel 45nm processors have to overclock.