It's all afterburners on at Intel with their aggressive assault by releasing the Wolfdale line of processors. It's an unexpected release, and there hasn't been enough action from the AMD Phenoms that released at the end of last year. Things have definitely not gone as planned. The E8500 is the spearhead processor of this new attack early in the year. One of the biggest changes in these processors is the move to 45nm fabrication process, which means cooler processors. The other changes in the E8500 are the 6 MB L2 cache (up from 4 MB) and the core speed-a dizzying 3.16 GHz.

All the synthetic benchmarks showed the expected boost in scores. The real-world rendering benchmark-Cinebench also gave a fairly large increment in performance in rendering but the benefit of the two additional cores on the quad core cannot be matched with a dual core processor just yet even with such a fast core. This means even the low-end quad core Q6600 shoots ahead in the rendering and video encoding tests. For gaming, the quad core is no match for the E8500 because games hardly exploit the four cores. The temperature, despite higher ambient temperatures, was just around 50 degrees C after some heavy benchmark bombardment.

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The performance increase throughout all the benchmarks from the E6850 is more or less 10-15 per cent, while the processors are all priced in the market at pretty much exactly the same as the earlier Core 2 Duos. The new processors then become better value for money. Anyone planning on upgrading to an E6850 should switch tracks and go for the E8500 or the other E8500 processors-they're faster, cooler and much better bang for the buck. The games that make proper use of quad cores processors are still
awaited, and until they arrive, the E8500 is an excellent choice for gaming rigs. Prices for the E8500 should be around Rs 13,000.