THE COMING OF quad core CPUs does not nec¬essarily mean dual cores are left behind. Intel recently launched dual core CPUs based on the power efficient 45nm manufacturing process. The second fastest dual core CPU from Intel, the Core 2 Duo E8500 made it to our labs. It is clocked at a high 3.16GHz and has 6MB shared L2 cache. The only faster CPUs from Intel are from the Extreme series, and this particular model strikes a price-perfor¬mance-power ratio that is hard to beat, even for Intel's own CPUs that are just about a year old.

Performance - Best in CLass
For a CPU that retails at about Rs. 12,500, perfor¬mance is as good as it gets thanks to a high clock speed, higher L2 cache and of course, the very efficient Core 2 architecture that helped Intel snatch the per¬formance crown from AMD.
It scored 124 points, the second high¬est on our performance charts. It is bettered only by the dual socket SkullTrail platform (reviewed in April 2008). As far as usual single socket systems go, this is as high as it gets.

In comparison, the Core 2 Quad Q6600, priced at about Rs.ll,OOO, clocked at 2.4GHz, but with four cores, managed only 105 points in do better with two cores with higher clock speed rather than four cores with lower clock.

When it comes to hard computing tasks however, the dual core E8500 looses out to the cheaper quad (four) core Q6600. A 3D rendering test with the lat¬est CiniBench yielded a score of 6635 for the E8500 and 8619 for the Q6600, nearly 30 percent higher.

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This is now turning out to be a case of cores versus clocks and the winner depends on the kind of contest. Or, in this case, the kind of applications you are running. A slightly older benchmark, PCMark 2005 seems to favor out¬right clock speed - the E8500 scores 7715 while the quad core Q6600 scores 6390.

Rendering 3D animation or encoding media is not an everyday task for most peo¬ple. Gaming however is. Our tests clearly indicate that games benefit much more from a faster dual core CPU than more number of cores clocked lower. Games are still not multithreaded enough to fully utilize more than two cores, even with the top of the line video card plugged in. We ran tests with the ATI Radeon 3870 X2 and across games and different settings, we saw better performance with the E8500 than with the Q6600. For example, DOOM 3 at maximum quality settings and 1280 x 1024 resolution ran at 193 fps with the E8500 and 161 fps with the Q6600.

Verdict - Great Buy for Enthusiasts
At Rs.12,500, the Core 2 Duo E8500 really has no competition. The quad core AMD CPU, the Phe¬nom 9500 is priced about the same, but falls woeful¬ly short of punch. The only other CPU that looks like a competition to the E8500 is Intel's own older quad core, the Q6600. But as our tests show, for everyday applications and gaming, even this CPU is outclassed by the E8500. It's only with CPU inten¬sive tasks like 3D render¬ing or media encoding that the Q6600 makes for a better buy. So, unless your needs are such, you will do well to go with this fast and power efficient (65W maximum dis¬sipation versus 105W for the Q6600) CPU if you are looking to build a perfor¬mance rig.