Can Lowest Core 2 Duo beat highest Pentium 4? Year 2006 Battle 

Back in the day I went from a 3 GHz Socket 775 Pentium 4 to a 1.86 GHz Pentium Dual Core (pretty much a Core 2 Duo with less L2 cache), and the performance difference was brutal, not only on gaming or video editing but also on day to day tasks, like web browsing.

To this day, I still find it amazing how much more efficient the Core 2 Duo is compared to the Pentium 4. I ran Pentium 4 machines as a kid and never thought anything with such a low clock speed would come close to a Pentium 4 3.8GHz but I stand corrected. Thanks for the videos, you do a great job presenting things!

Hey Phil! If you can, I definitely recommend you to include *1% lows and 0.1% lows* to your charts like RandomGaminginHD does to explain these stutters better. Some processors might do better averages, but their inconsistency is spotted relatively easily by those *1% lows and 0.1% lows*

This is the time when PCs really started to take off in my experience. So many good things happening in a short period of time: Intel got their act together for real with Core 2, we got DDR3 memory, PCI Express, SATA, Nvidia grew up and gave us the 8800 series, ATI still made great cards and so on.. Really, really good time to be a PC nerd. :) I like to say that Core 2 launched Intel's dominance, and Sandy Bridge cemented it. Although aging nowadays, the 2600k is likely the strongest product Intel has made so far. Excited for future episodes!

Dual/quad core CPU's pretty much killed P4 almost immediately, I remember when Xbox 360 PC ports started coming out Pentium 4 just couldn't handle them, it was already obsolete.

Man, looking back, I don't know how I survived being stuck on a Pentium 4 platform for so long. I remember the experience of chugging along doing basically ANYTHING, let alone trying to play games. Without a graphics card, gaming was out of the question; single digit fps was the norm, or if i was lucky, I might break into the double digits. I don't know how, but at some point I acquired a gpu and I was able to play some games. Back when COD4 was new, I remember I got it on PC even though I knew I was way under minimum spec. I played it anyway, it ran like trash, if it wanted to run at all, and it was great. Man, those were the days when I would salivate over the thought of having my own new gaming pc... and yet, it wasn't until the end of 2010 that I finally had that opportunity. My ambition got the better of me, you could say, and I skipped right over the Core 2 series and went straight for a new first gen i7. It was way more than I ever needed and it put me into debt for a good few years, but I never regretted it for a second. You couldn't even say the difference was night and day; more like if you'd been living in a dark cave your whole life and finally stepped out and saw the sun for the first time.

Core 2's were awesome in their day. Was when I finally abandoned AMD after years of loyalty but performance was too hard to ignore

IPC went up three times between the Pentium and Core 2 Duo.

Ah yes, the E6300, the heart of the first PC I've ever built after too many summer jobs. AND YOU EVEN START WITH GTA SAN ANDREAS. Love it

The e6300 was one of the best budget processors because of the high overclocking potential. The e6300 could be overclocked with standard voltage at 2800-3000 mhz.

I knew the outcome - yet I still watched the whole video :D I find it strangely satisfying.

I remember making this exact decision with my first gaming pc. I could've had the pentium with twice the ram or the e6300. Went for the e6300 and managed to overclock to 3ghz on the stock cooler for years. One of the best value cpus of all time imo

The E6300 was also just a massive overclocing champ. I had an E6400 back then and got it from 2.13GHX to 3.2GHZ 24.7 stable no problem. I had a friend with the E6300 who was able to get it to a whopping 3.6ghz stable all the time and I was just blown away by the versatility of this chip, was a fantastic time to by a computer enthusiast and overclocker. You just don't get 50%+ overclocking gains out of CPUs anymore.

Phil: the only youtuber who pronounces Wolfenstein with the correct German accent. :D

Wow you're making me feel better about my old E5200 CPU PC. It was like 2.5 GHz. It was a big step up for me from the 2GHz P4 I was running before it.

I used to have a 3.8 ghz pentium 4 processor and it could play games like GTA San Andreas, Resident Evil 4, Elder Scrolls 4, Far Cry 1 and 2, Assassin's Creed 1, Crysis, and even GTA 4 (barely though for GTA 4). It had Windows Vista and then Windows 7 installed, 512 mb video ram, 3 gb ram, a DVD-drive (forgot the speed though). It was a fast computer for the 2000's decade. But, even the lowest Intel Core 2 Duo processor is slightly faster than the highest Pentium 4 in terms of processing speed.

I have so many good memories from the Core 2 series due to how my first PC I built by my self had a Core2Duo which I later upgraded to a quad. Still it was only a few years ago but It was really nice creating something by yourself and now since I've upgraded to LGA1155 it's mainly used for older titles on both Windows XP and 7, still it's always a blast using it!

I remember going from my P4 OC’d to 4 GHz to an E6750 OC’d to 3.5 GHz...undeniably the biggest CPU upgrade I’ve made to this date.

Bro why do these old ass games look better than PUBG but run on a bloody P4 at 100fps

Core 2 was released in mid 2006, what came in 2005 was the Pentium D

Slowest Conroe based Pentium Dual Core vs Fastest Pentium D would be interesting. Back then, I had a single core Conroe based Celeron at 2Ghz. I'd love to see that matched against a Prescott P4 with double the clock speed.

yeh there's a reason the P4 architecture was killed off. the core line was basically an evolution of the P3 architecture. IDK if they used anything from P4 after that

I can hear the little Simpsons kid screaming at the Core 2 Duo saying STOP! He's already dead!

It's worth noting that this is a single core Netburst vs a dual core Core 2. It would be interesting to disable HT on the P4 and one core on the Core 2 to see the actual IPC improvement between generations. Though your recent Pentium D testing shows that Netburst didn't gain much from the second core in gaming. So the results might end up being very similar to what we saw in this video.

Another great video. I love this channel! Just goes to show you what a huge leap the Core architecture was compared to Netburst.

Loved the E6300. It was my first dual core and the performance boost it provided was kind of mindblowing. Especially since it was clocked so much lower! It didn't make any sense! Hah. Add to that the fact that you could overclock it and I had that CPU in my main rig for quite a few years. With the stock cooler you could bump it up over 2Ghz no problem (think I did 2.2). Put a fancier cooler on it like you showed and it can do 3hz easily. Even on a cheaper motherboard. Good times.

You should do a video about the “BSL” or “Tape” mod for the core 2 cpus, it’s a very interesting way to squeeze some life out of a core 2 when you don’t have an overclockable motherboard, like a lot of those older oem workstations that can be found for pennies on the dollar

Thank you! I've been waiting for something just like this!

I had that E6300 best cpu ever for OC, ran that baby on 3GHz for 24/7 config prime95 stable for 8 hours. What a bargin for monster performance.

Good old 2007. I had a 4 years old home PC with an expensive p4 3GHz processor. And I bought myself a brand new DELL xps m1210 with Core Duo, not even Core2Duo processor. That was a beast machine! 😂 Almost 15 years later I have replaced Core Duo with Core 2 Duo and this Dell is still alive and usable with modern Linux mint 64 bit 😊

I always wanted one of these back in the day, but I ended up going with an Athlon x2 for cost. I always read about the E6300 Conroes and how good they were at overclocking. I think it would be cool if you had a video where you overclocked the E6300, like the video you did on overclocking the P2 era Celeron.

Fun video! The first computer I built from components had an LGA 775 board with DDR3 memory. I had (and still have) an EVGA Nforce 790i ultra SLI, 2x GTX 9800+ and a Core2Quad q9450, with 4 gigs of 1333MHz low voltage DDR3. I built the computer in 2008, so a decade ago. Having said that, I personally don't consider LGA 775 DDR3 to quite be retro. Most of the games for that platform run just fine on modern architecture, with few to no bugs at all. This is the period in gaming when 16:9 monitors really started taking off as well, so there are very few aspect ratio hacks (if any) you have to do to run games from that era on contemporary hardware. Testing Conroe (and to a lesser extent, Wolfdale) chips should be fine, but Kentsfield (q6600) and Yorkfield are already very modern and powerful architectures that can still run most new games with few problems if any when overclocked. You could do a retrospective on these processors if you wanted, but I'm not sure if there's enough meaningful retro content with just intel chips. It might be interesting to compare the Athlon 64 x2 6000+, alongside first generation Phenom (which was a huge letdown at the time), and maybe even some Phenom IIs or Athlon IIs (which are very contemporary, like the competing intel platform at the time). The Phenom II x2 555 BE in particular was a very interesting chip, as you could often unlock two dormant cores on the chip and get a quad-core processor on the cheap, like a callback to the old celerons that could be overclocked for top-tier performance at a budget price. That being said, it's on a very modern AM3 platform, so it might be a little bit too new for the general content of your channel.

wow what an improvement core 2 was.

Loved my E6320 with the larger 4mb cache. Got a cooler for it and bumped it to 2.8ghz. I was AMD for a long time prior to that with my Opteron 146, but after Core 2 came out I never looked back. I'd like to see comparisons between high clocked core 2 quad and 1st gen i5. I get it's out of the retro area that you normally cover but I think it would be quite nostalgic for a lot of us, even if it was comparatively recent. I didn't upgrade until Sandy Bridge so I'd be interested to see how much the previous gen improved over core 2. Might also want to see just how much the first batch of Core 2 Duo's outperformed the AM2 Athlon X2's. Thanks, love the vids as always.

Wow, all these games from my childhood, what a nostalgia trip. Thanks for making my day Phil.

I still have a Dell xps with the Pentium D 3.73 EE. Use it every day and just upgraded the video card to a gtx460 which i bought new. Still works great and performs very well for every day use.

The E6300 was a really nice cpu to have but it was in one of the few pcs I ever sold. The motherboard was garbage (ECS), the PSU adequate and everything else inside was the minimum someone would need. Well I guess I had proper timing when I sold it as I got $250 for the whole thing and about 2 weeks later the guy said it broke down but he didn't want me to take a look at it when I asked to so who knows how much survived. Anyway I got good money for the E6300 system when I sold it but honestly wished I kept it like I kept the original system I built for my son. It is now my rule of the thumb to run them into the ground as basically I build what I need and get many years out of them and by the time I sell them there is no point in doing so. Anyway great video as usual. Oh and now I see you have PayPal as your way to pay you. I had thought Patreon would be the way you would go but I have no problem using PayPal. I use it all the time. When $$$$ and such gets straightened out I will contribute my 2 cents a month as your show is one of the few I watch on a regular basis. Keep up the good work. : )

This video brings back the feeling I had when I read the review of the first Core 2 Duo, so fast and so energy efficient. Man that was a fantastic time. Looking forward to the DDR3 build!! 😀

Nice video. Even just one core usage, the E6300 at 1,86 could easily compete with the 3,8 GHz P4. Much cooler and less power hungry. Many games in 2001-2006 did not even took really advantage of multi cores. So that says A LOT. For late XP 2004-2008 gaming, the C2D is an awesome choice. However I would pick a P4 or Athlon 64 (with AGP!) for 98SE or early XP(2001-2004) Retro gaming. Maybe just for compatibility. The biggest innovation step in the 2000's regarding CPU's. Was like they reinvented the Pentium (as from 486 >> Pentium in the 90's). I believe that C2D was Intels last true breakthough in the CPU world. From there... just tick-tock money making game they did.

you should do the same but with the fastest single-core Athlon/slowest Athlon X2

Oh when I upgraded to my Core 2 Quad q6600 my 1333mhz DDR3 memory was clocked back to 1066 because of the Q6600's FSB so I know the feeling. But hey it made the RAM last longer since it's underclocking it. Also the E6300 is a very overclockable CPU from my reading and I have heard users getting it to 3ghz. Im willing to bet the the lowest clock Core 2 duo would out perform the highest clock Pentium D chip based on the video you made previously the about the Highest clocked Pentium 4 vs the highest clocked Pentium D. Man it was a huge upgrade for me when I went to a Pentium 4 3.0ghz to a Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.0ghz I was able to watch HD videos without it stuttering.

I remember when we finally got a new PC back in the days and it had a E6320 which is also clocked at 1,86ghz... Man it felt like an entire world is opening, before I had a P4 HT 2,80ghz on So. 478 and around 1GB RAM for it's time. I used the E6320 for many years until I got a E7200 which was a rock solid beast at 3,5Ghz at stock voltage in combination with a ASUS P5k but in mid 2013 I upgraded to a C2Q Q8200 which was kinda weak in single core performance but since more and more applications were optimized to use multi core, the C2Q was ahead.

Hi All, Nice, the P4 was OK, ( OK not Great ) , but it did grow in clock speed and managed to run Win XP fine plus memory often was around 2 to 4 gig on systems, I recall at work that as soon as we installed office or Mcafee all the available resources would be chewed up. Brand new machine would fly, but as soon as office was installed for email users, they became a slug. There is a Core Duo that was used in 2006, i dont know if it was generally available to the non macintosh public as it was used by Apple when they completed the use of the Power PC systems. - If you test a early Mackbook or Imac, you can install windows in a second partition BTW my daily driver is a 2013 Lenovo SFF that i bought new, it has Core2 Duo G3220 and 12G ram, i find it runs perfectly well on everything except encoding movies, but i really like it, it is quiet, temperatures are cool, stable ( may run 5-6 weeks non stop with Win 7) For me the best move away from P4 was a good move for laptops, no more 2-3 hour battery life and the laptop runs much cooler, desktops were a bit annoying but at least you had vents and fans to cool it down, losing IDE cables and floppy drives and going to sata greatly helped the internal air flow and most stock systems with a core2duo only run with a single fan that is basically quiet RegardsGeorge

Great vid as always.

More end-game testing would be P4 at 4.0Ghz vs E6800 at 4.0Ghz or at least 3.6Ghz if the silicon couldn't achieve that.

I think you should compare the fastest P4 to the lowest denomination but fastest clocked Core series part, the Celeron 450. There was an engineering sample Celeron 460 at 2.4 GHz, but it was never officially released. The Celeron 450 is a single core 2.2 GHz part with an 800 MHz FSB. You could also try the absolute slowest Core 2 series dual core, the Celeron E1200.

Strange, perhaps you can try a Pentium D instead of the Pentium 4 3.8, then we'll have two dual core CPU's to compate against either other.

My office PC used to have an E6300. Was miles ahead of my Pentium 4 1.5 Socket 478.Then I bought a Core 2 Duo E8400 and was simply blown away by its performance!

I'm still rocking that old 212 evo it still runs cool

Good comparison, enjoyed it, one tip when comparing CPU's, use some RTS benchmarks of the day, Command and Conquer Generals for example, or Empire Earth. RTS games are CPU constrained and should really show the differences in CPUs.

Thats pretty interesting cause in my office, i still have a Core 2 Duo E6300 and i think its very interesting how it compares. Thanx for the video :)

another things those graphs don't show is the power usage difference between the two.

I had a C2D E6600 back in the day inside of a Dell Dimension 9200/XPS410. It was a beast of a processor. At that time, my parents had a Dimension E510 with a P4 640 3.2 GHz

Moving to 2006 era! That's really cool! Anyway, Can you test the between C2D and Athlon 64 X2? (Both are dual cores!) The my first had a high-end Gigabyte GA-MA59SLI-S5, Athlon 64 X2 6400+ @ 3.2ghz, DDR2 8GB RAM and GTX 7800 (SLI'd but died and replaced GT430 which mininal improvement performance) I'd like to see in next video! ;)

Just before the GFC i got a Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz (3.2 oc) with 4 GB DDR2 800MHz CL4 and 9600GT. This was a massive step in the right direction from a s478 HT P4 2.8GHz and HD3850. FINALLY i could play Crysis! Then i got another 9600GT off Ebay AU and OMG was it good to have SLi again. Then my XFX 680i LT died and the shop disappeared cuz of the GFC. The used 780i i got to replace it was DOA as well... Needless to say this was the first and last time i ever bought a new PC from a store. Or trusted XFX. I think it was a few years before i got over it and found a Gigabyte EP45, but this is a CROSSFIRE board, NOT SLi. So some bits, hacks and tweaks later and i'm back in SLi action... by now the Dual Core is getting very weak... and then DX11 games came out...

I was very glad to see when Intel came out with the C2D chips. I had always taken baby steps to upgrading and that's exactly what it felt like when going from my 1.2GHz PGA370 to a P4 @ 2.8GHz; faster, but not as fast as I was expecting it to be. When I upgraded from that to any C2D it was noticeable and very satisfactory! Even my laptop C2D T7700 and T9500 units were blowing any P4 away! Intel didn't impress me much with the P4 CPUs, but they did it right when they released these C2D chips!

I had some Dell tower with the fastest Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. Put a decent video card in it and sold it for $75 as a retro game machine for Windows XP. Ran XP very well.

I had/have a Pentium E6300 that was clocked a 2.83Ghz with the same 2MB of L2 Cache. It was in an HP p61200f computer I'd bought in 2009. I ended up replacing the CPU with a 3Ghz Intel Q9650 in 2010.

I had one of these C2D processors at one time and my buddy had a Pentium D I think it was 3.2GHz or something around that. I bet him that my C2D would be faster and he went on and on about how 1.8GHz was way too slow to be useful etc. Well pretty sure the C2D didn't just keep up but beat it in most if not all of the benchmarks we ran. The new architecture really was a big improvement for Intel at the time.

When it comes to the memory, FSB based systems cannot take advantage of memory running higher than the FSB. So in this instance, assuming the memory runs in dual-channel aka 128-bit, the E6300 on FSB 266 (1066QDR) cannot take advantage of more than 533Mhz memory. Sure you can run them faster, but it will not really give you any noticeable performance. The best solution there is to keep them running sync with FSB and keep the timings as tight as possible. Or even better solution as was typical with E6300, overclock the FSB to 400Mhz and boom you are sync on 800Mhz DDR2.

Hey Phil, you OK? You sound like you're a tad ill there. Still running a Core 2 based rig myself, based on a Q9650 at stock 3.0GHz speed, which is still a good processor to have even 10 years on from it's initial launch.

Your "hey guys" triggered Google assistant on my phone 😁

I still find it comical just how bad netburst was. Pipeline far too long, with really poor branch prediction. It's no wonder they basically dragged the P3 back in and updated from there.

I think best compression is between high clock Pentium d (like 945) and low clock c2d (like e4600) . Its pure netburst vs. core and its fair( both of them have 2 cores and FSB 800 )

The lowest core 2 duo is the e4300 at 1.80ghz fsb 800

Great video like always, thumb up ... Now I am curious the same happened from core 2 duo to core 2 quad or i7 :)

Actually got a laptop recently for $5 with a Core 2 Duo 1.8GHz T5670. So, fun enough it's just a bit slower than their initial line-up. The only part that's actually sad to me is Intel deciding to remove VT-x from various "budget" models. Beyond that, it's actually really great if you want to run something like Lakka off an SD (takes some fiddling with something like plop since various laptop BIOSs don't boot off the sd card) or Windows XP.

Great comparison as always. Pentium D 960 would have beed fitted nice between these two processors.

Should have used E2140 for lowest clocked C2D :)

Do a video about the E4300. It was a E6300 with less cache and a lower FSB. The latter made it an absolute legend! ANY E4300 could be OCed to FSB1066 without additional Voltage (1.8->2.4 Ghz), often, even 3GHz was very easy with the stock fan. With good cooling, you could go even higher. Edit: This is a time-period correct example of a typical 2006 PC using the E4300 OC legend: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-feXWIzssGmA.html

Very interesting. I remember about 8 years ago I had the E6300 and it was having trouble with Titan Quest at 1080p. I had a Pentium D 950 (3.40GHz) lying around so I threw that in there. It actually did better for that specific game. I guess some older games can only do single core and enjoy the high clocks. The Core 2 was more responsive in pretty much everything else.

By 2005 I still had this single core 2ghz celeron (Northwood, 2002) which actually lasted me until Sandy Bridge, needless to say when I finally upgraded I had a massive backlog of newer games to catch up with x)

athlon 64 x2 vs core 2 duo?

This stuff is great, It reminds me of a Tom's Hardware article from 2011 titled "Tom's CPU Architecture Shootout". In the same vein; I'd love to see a RAM comparison DDR1vsDDR2vsDDR3 for 775. I wonder how much the RAM holds back the core2 on the 775i65g.

P4 vs Core 2 Solo?

I still believe that the Netburst architecture will still smoke the C2D in video editing, rendering and productivity tasks. Gaming is a completely different story though, and once 2007-8 hit most new applications knew how to take advantage of the Core architecture.

You can use the unified GPU usage on the first settings page in afterburner to show the info you're missing.

before core2duo, pentium M with half the clockrate and consume half the power is able to match pentium 4. but it was too expensive. then intel developed the dual core version of it which we know as core 2 duo. remember centrino?

Remember having an E6400, clocked to 3.4GHz and it was great for its price. Back when a dual core was enough for gaming.

Hello Phil, in your Need for Speed tests there are no competitiors ahead of you. I wonder how much performance drop they may cause if they are visible.

This processor have his history

Core 2 architecture was legend

This agrees with my results. The P4 is inferior to Core, any clock combination. However, a few important notes must be added here. It is not quite fair to compare C2D with a P4. A more fair would be a Pentium Dual-Core (eg, the E2140) or perhaps even the Celeron Dual-Core (eg, the E1200) -- and that, with the dual core counter part on the Netburst side -- that is, the Pentium D. Now, of course both Netburst and Core are superior overclockers, and while overclocked Core cannot be compared with Netburst, overclocked Netburst actually might beat the lowest Core. And finally, here is a good one. Ready? Netburst can outperform Sandy Bridge. Sounds impossible? Well, overclocked Pentium D does outperform the Celeron 847. So there you have it, albeit at the cost of about a order of magnitude higher power consumption, 17W versus maybe 200W of overclocked Netburst, it can beat Sandy Bridge even!

7:57 mark: "Ah, SHIT... Here we go again.."

These had amazing overclocking potential. I bought an E6400 at release and it ran 3.2GHz at stock voltage. Really great CPUs, especially for the money.

I love my old Core 2 Duo system - E6500, which I ran constantly overclocked at 2.71 GHz for years with the stock cooler and no hiccups or whatsoever. I really want to rebuild it with a better PSU and 2x2GB DDR2 sticks. I still have my copy of Neverwinter Nights 2, that came in the GeForce 8600 GT box when I was putting the system together. \m/

I installed windows 10 upgrade on a p4d back when it was a free upgrade for a laugh, the p4 was so slow it took a day to upgrade all the windows 7 patches then upgrade to windows 10. Back in the garage it went.

Wow makes me happy that I upgraded my AGP benchmarking system to a newer motherboard that supports core 2. The pentium D 945 im using is good, but when testing the HD3850 AGP it feels held back... very shortly it will be paired with an E6600 :)

Got an E6300 in the little SFF HP next to me, used it in my main desktop up until 2015 or so because it has VT-x, unlike some of the higher clocked C2Ds. Now it's for the comfy Haiku box.

i remembered c2d at 2006 they launched, what a great cpu, and all games works better

Hi Phil, can you get your hands on a Pentium-M Dothan in order to compare with these two? Should be close to the Core 2 Duo being a close relative to it, but only has one core of course.

There was also Core 2 Duo E4300, just a little bit worse, but results would be very similar.

The Athlon 64 X2 and Core 2 Duo/Quad lines of CPUs are my absolute favourite. They'll run absolutely anything and everything :P The newer, cheaper end Pentiums and Athlons, like the G4560 and such, are pretty neat too. Super low cost and they're still very good chips - my server runs said Pentium and it's fantastic.

Actually, the e6300 (1.86 GHz) is not the lowest clocked Core 2 Duo. The lowest clocked Core 2 Duo is the e4300 running at 1.80 GHz. Plus the Core 2 Duo e4300 has a slower FSB of 800 MHz, compared to the 1066 of the Core 2 Duo e6300.

There must be some hiccups playing in pentium 4, however why do I feel more focussed than dual cores... Dual core feels cool however always something debugging to run the two heads.... Am I the only one feeling like this?

As expected. When i switched from my p4 to a phenom II x6 i had twice the performance in single thread and those phII were comparable in ipc to the core 2 series so i recall that overall i had x12 the power. That Phenom II x6 1055T @ 3.5GHz is still my main machine after almost 10 years 24/7 😊

You should look for the Asus P5Q motherboard. It supports FSB speeds from 667 to 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM. The CPU support list is rather long. It would be a great candidate for testing different speeds and CPUs.

Painkiller..... I still have no idea how to defeat the final boss..... By the way, will you introduce Athlon64 X2 in the future?

Can you compare the highest clocked pentium 4 vs. the celeron 450 ? That would be very interesting.

The P4 670 has only one core (with HT), while the C2D E6300 has two cores - this would also explain a bit the smoother framerates you noticed.