AmericanNightmare (8/30/2007)

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Most Core 2 Duos overclock extremely well i wouldn't be suprised at all if you could get 4.0GHz stable with an E6600 depending on your cooling.   Glad to see someone else posting here even if they do represent the "dark side"

Just curiosity, why are you so 'high' on AMD and 'down' on Intel? I had the choice when I built my new box to go either way.

After studying the processor architecture and reading many reviews, it appeared to me that the Intel chips were better for overclocking than AMD. Also, most of the higher end dual cores had 4mb L2 vs 512kb to 1mb on AMD's if I remember correctly.

As I said, just a point of curiosity since I'm getting ready to do a 'build' for my wife's new machine and again I have the option to go either way. Then on the other hand she may inherit my current machine and I can up the ante a bit on my own box. Right now the GA-965P-DS3 with an E6600 and 2gb of 800 DDR2 dual channel looks awfully attractive, and, I'd like to set up a dual boot with Vista Ultimate and SuSe Linux.

Steve 

Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 Mother Board
Intel E6850 Processor, oc'd to 3.4ghz
4gb DDR2 800mhz G.skill Dual channel ram 
MSI GeForce GX8600GT Twin Turbo Video 
Aspire Xdiscover case with lots of fans
Antec 650 Watt PSU, 250 gb SATA HD, 2 Samsung DVD writers

The higher end Core 2 Duos have a 4MB shared L2 while the X2 5200+,6000+ and Opteron 1000 series to mention a few have a 2 x 1MB L2 i.e. each physical processor or "core" has it's own 1MB cache as opposed too a single 4MB L2 shared between cores in the Core 2 Duo. 

I am not truly down on Intel i mostly do that for my own amusement anyone who can read knows at the moment the Core 2 Duos are superior. 

  What i am a bit down on are the fanbois out there that extoll the Core 2 Duo as some sort of super chip that AMD will never be able to top which is just plain silly the big boys AMD and Intel have both been on top as far as performance goes and it will probably continue too go that way for a long time.  These are the same people who are already poo pooing the Phenom without knowing what is truly capable of yet no one does there are a lot of rumours,speculation and "leaks"  AMD has a habit of distributing vague rumours and leaks the droppping the other boot when the chip is released.  This is what happened with the X2 as well, "preliminary repots show blah blah blah it's slow, it won't compete"... then when it hit the market and folks starting benchmarking it was all WOW! at that point it dominated anything Intel had for quite awhile until the Core 2 Duo was released so now the shoes is on the other foot again.

The Core 2 Duo smokes anything AMD has at the moment they are fast,powerful and superb overclockers but thier reign has been fairly short so far.  Come November we will all know for sure if the dark side can be subdued once again or if it will continue to wield it's power.

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All of that being said if you look at a little thing known as price/performance the gap between Intel and AMD closes like a bear trap.  Using a X2 5200+ at $130 and the E4400 at $125 as examples the X2 5200+ offers more bang for your buck.  If we begin to compare the Opteron vs. the Xeon the AMD advantage is even larger in price/performance you simply cannot find a 2GHz Xeon that can match an Opteron 1212 (2.0GHz).

As far as your wifes machine goes if you do end up building her a new one it's hard to beat X2 3600+ Brisbane for $65 at newegg.  They overclock very easily, you could bump it up to 2.5 or so for her and unless she's a hardcore gamer i would think that would be more than adequate.  The Brisbanes are 65nm based and a slight Vcore bump will not shorten thier life significantly though with mild overclocks that is rarely needed anyway.  To touch on that a little more there seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding about the relationship between overclocking and CPU life unless you are running your processor at a higher than rated Vcore (even then a .50 increase above rated won't shorten much) and at extremly high clock speeds and temps the odds of you shortening your CPU's life to any significant extent are slim indeed.  Most processors will be replaced by something more modern way before any shortening of thier life will be realized anyway.

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*If you can find a Core 2 Duo in the same price range as my Opteron 1212 that can outperform it at stock speeds let me know

 My highest so far although not quite stable.. The 3.0 in my sig is my highest stable so far.

X2 3600+ Brisbane 1.9GHz @ 3.18 http://valid.x86-secret.com/show_oc.php?id=281599