Introducing the contenders

In the blue corner we got the E7400 ( retailing around 120-150 euros ). In the red corner the awesome E8600 (in many shops available at twice the price of the E7400 ) Both CPU's are based on the "Wolfdale" core and therefore are both 45nm Dual cores. Main differences are the amount of Level 2 cache ( 3 vs 6Mb ) and the FSB ( 266 vs 333FSB ) More technical details are in the table below :



As you can see there's not much separating these 2 CPU's, besides the 0.5 extra multi (E7400) and the Virtualisation Technology available for the E8600.

The main objective of this article is to find out if the cache is really worth the premium price. The FSB difference between both CPU's can be corrected by running a small OC. For those that do not want to touch any of the bios settings, testing will be also conducted at the following speed : 10 X 266FSB = 2.66Ghz (so basically at E7300 speeds). Second test will be done at E8600 speed : 10 X 333FSB = 3.33Ghz. Most enthusiasts run these CPU's daily at 4ghz or higher. I opted for 2 different FSB speeds ( 10 x 400 and 8 x 500 ) This approach was chosen to determine if the Level 2 cache gets any benefits from a higher FSB and secondly to see if there's a better scaling in favour of the E8600 with its larger cache.

Test Setup and Test Methodology

Both CPU's we tested at the previously mentioned speeds in multiple applications and some new games.

Hopefully we will get a clearer view if the cache size is that important yes or no.

Take note that the test setup is based on a DDR3 motherboard. So please compare only the results of each CPU at the same clock speed. The total ram speed depends on the FSB settings and the available working dividers. Where possible ram speed was kept the same. Timings were kept at 8-8-8-24 2T and performance setting was fixed at PL9.

A quick summation of the CPU speed settings used:

FSB 266 : 1066mhz ram speed : 10 multiplier, total CPU speed : 2.66Ghz
FSB 333 : 1333Mhz ram speed : 10 multiplier, total CPU speed : 3.33Ghz
FSB 400 : 1600Mhz ram speed : 10 multiplier, total CPU speed : 4.00Ghz
FSB 500 : 1600Mhz ram speed : 8 multiplier, total CPU speed : 4.00Ghz

Leeghoofd's E7400/E8600 Test Setup
CPU	E7400/E8600 clock speeds @ 2.66, 3.33 and 4Ghz
Cooling	Thermalright eXtreme + 1200rpm PAPST Fan
Mainboard	Gigabyte EP45T UD3P F5 Bios
Memory	4Gb Corsair PC12800 C8-8-8-24 2T
OS	Windows XP with Service Pack 3
PSU	OCZ ModStream 700W
Video Card	- Geforce 9800 GTX for all tests, except: - Geforce GTX 285 for Crysis Warhead

Benchmarks and Application used

Futuremark 3DMARK 2001 SE and 2006

Futuremark PCMARK 2005

Wprime 32 and 1024

Superpi 1mb

Lavalys Everest Ultimate Edition Cache and Mem Benchmark

Cinebench R10

X264 HD V2.0 Benchmark

Fritz Chess Benchmark

Far Cry 2 (high detail settings)

Crysis Warhead (gamer setting)

Note that for the game tests I opted for the in-game benchmark with FarCry2 and a Custom benchmark for Crysis Warhead. Resolutions tested are 1024 x 768 and 1280 X 1024.

3DMark2001 and 3DMark2006

Let's start off with the beloved Futuremark tests :

3dmark 2001 is up first :



Difference in cache is amazingly noticeable in this benchmark. I expected a nice advantage for the E8600. As 3dmark always loved bandwith and high FSB action. But this was more than expected as the E8600 trashed the E7400 clock for clock with an average of 5000 points. For your info I reran each test 3 times. If there were big discrepancies I redid them once more to verify the results. 3dmark2001 loves cache, if benching is your game, then there's only one obvious choice here.

3dmark 2006 next :



The E8600 scores slightly better than the E7400, but the performance gain isn't as big as with the 2001 benchmark. 3dmark2006 loves multiple cores. The more cores the merrier, but since both competitors are quite alike performance difference is negligible.

Cinebench Release 10, Superpi and Wprime



Neck to neck race here, with the smallest advantage for the E8600. Cache seems to have zilch effect in this benchmark, neither does a higher FSB.



SuperPi works in a similar way as 3dmark2001. Tight latencies and cache...all seem to help to nibble of them precious thousands of a second. It's nice to see this benchmark scale with increased CPU speeds. The gap closes between the 2 cpu's when we increase total CPU speed, so the extra cache loses some of its effectiveness.

Wprime32 is a brute CPU powerhog test. Like with Cinebench there's not much that differentiates these 2 CPU's. Total CPU speed rules cache for sure...

The latter findings are also nicely reflected in Wprime 1024 :



The E8600 starts strong at 2.66Ghz with over 8 secs advantage over it's little brother. However once we crank up the CPU speed it's so extremely close that we cannot hand over the victory to the E8600.

Everest, Fritz Chess and Techarp X264 HD Benchmark

Everest Ultimate edition memory bandwidth and latency:



It's becoming quite repetitive ( sorry for that ) but again no clear winner here. You might say okay E8600 wins all these tests but from my own experience 50mb more in ram bandwidth is hardly noticeable in day to day use. If we compare both 4ghz clocks you can see that the extra FSB and lower multiplier does give a nice healthy boost here.



For the extreme performance purists looking at the latency results there's only one option. E8600 all the way here. We see loads of these Everest screens in many forums where there seems to be battle between members to get the lowest latency and highest bandwidth scores. Yet again I'm very sceptical if this can be reflected in daily usage.

Fritz Chess Benchmark :



This benchmark compares a good old P3 1ghz to modern CPU's. It's amassing to see how big the difference in computing power has become in the last years. E8600 snatches the lead, but yet again with a minimal advantage.

Techarp X264 HD Benchmark :



With this encoding test the E8600 edges the E7400 clock for clock. Being repetitive as ever, there's not much to look at. Gains are minimal.

PCMark05, Far Cry 2 and Crysis Warhead

To get a better view on the CPU and therefore system performance I included PC MARK05 in here :

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Looking at just the CPU scores, not much difference hu ? But looking closer at the total scores, these seem to get a nice boost with the larger cache available. So overall sytem performance is a tiny bit better. Of course this is synthetic and might be hard to notice when (ab)using your PC.

Some Game benchmarks

I swapped the 9800GTX for a GTX 285 to avoid having a GPU bottleneck. Also I opted to test at 1024 and 1280 resolution as I wanted to clearly notice the influence of the CPU. I didn't test 800 resolution as hardly anyone uses it. AA and AF were also not selected in the benchmark tools.

FarCry 2 under the loop :



For max performance the larger cache CPU is a must. Far Cry 2 does like the extra cache and for sure the extra gains from a using higher FSB. It's nice to see such a new game title give high FPS with detail settings on high (although at lower resolution)

Crysis Warhead :



Apparently I didn't succeed to avoid having a GPU bottleneck here. Benchmark settings were set on Gamer level and on DirectX9. 1280 x 1024 is clearly GPU limited as any increase in CPU speed is not affecting the score at all. 1024 resolution test show that from 3.3Ghz on, we are again encountering GPU limitations. I could have retested Crysis maybe on a lower detail level but the E7400 seemed to be powerful enough to keep the framerate on par with the E8600.

Conclusive Thoughts

So how do we draw a conclusion from all these tests ? These CPU's seem pretty much on par in some tests, yet in some the E8600 outshines its little brother. Maybe if we look at different users it might be easier:

• The casual PC user : is it worth to cash out big time for the E8600 ? Absolutely not. Get the cheaper alternative and don't mind the remarks from your PC minded neighbours, that you only bought an E7400. Just tell him you made the smarter choice as the little performance gain is hardly worth the extra cash. If he doesn't digg that, just give him my cellphone number!
  
  
• The Gamer : I frequently visit LANs and get pretty aroused by seeing high end hardware in some game rigs. Yet you got 2 different classes here; the show offs ( Me! Me! Me! ) and the budget minded gamer. If maximum gaming performance is what you are after and you cannot live with the fact that the person next to you might have a few frames per second more than you, than buy the E8600. If you rather put that money in some brewskis, grab an E7400.
  
  
• The Overclocker : World record beaters will not even think one second about grabbing an E7400. Every extra feature could mean the difference between establishing a new level or just being one of them wannabees. I've got a nice E7400 in my possession and it clocks really great, though heat output above 4.2Ghz is hardly controllable by my Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme cooler. Also looking at several forum users with the same lower end CPU's overclocking varies a lot. 3.6Ghz-3.8Ghz seems pretty common between the E7XX users, for the "let's call them real wolfdales" 4Ghz is average. I mentioned the heat output before and I think this is due to the fact that the IHS (Internal Heat Spreader) is not soldered on the E7XX series, but glued.

So to sum things up: Is the cache worth it for most PC users ? Absolutely not ! Put the money in a faster GFX card, better CPU cooler etc... The price difference is too big to justify the few gains you will get in real world applications. With the first Core 2 Duo the 1Mb vs 2Mb vs 4Mb L2 cache was definitely more noticeable. Between 3 and 6mb the gap is pretty small.

I hope you found these tests interesting, until next time!