e4300 e4400 e6320 e6420: which one to choose?

Page 3 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar

Which do you want?

  • e4300

    Votes: 23 13.9%

  • e4400

    Votes: 48 28.9%

  • e6320

    Votes: 27 16.3%

  • e6420

    Votes: 68 41.0%
  • Total voters
    166
No way a ds3 is capable of 500fsb, that way high, perhaps a bit over 400, but not 500, that's either rd600 or 680i status, perhaps gigabyte's dq6 could, but not the ds3. That's the bottom of the line mobo for conroe's based off the 965p chipset
Click to expand...

You gotta be kidding me... :roll:
 
It still towards teh bottom line, if you wanted a top end one, you'd go with the dq6 or dfi's board. Or for midrange you'd go for the ds4 with at least heatpipes. The ds3 just happens to have a good bios, it still has hardly any features.
Click to expand...

Most overclockers just prefer the DS3 (or even S3) due to the price. You're right, it's fairly light on features, there are much better boards feature wise, they just cost more.

And trust me, the max FSB on a DS3 is closer to 500MHz than 400MHz. 😉
 
No way a ds3 is capable of 500fsb, that way high, perhaps a bit over 400, but not 500, that's either rd600 or 680i status, perhaps gigabyte's dq6 could, but not the ds3. That's the bottom of the line mobo for conroe's based off the 965p chipset
Click to expand...

You gotta be kidding me... :roll:


Did it on my S3. Really wasn't that difficult.
ccpuz-1.jpg
 
Whoever wrote that either lied, has an amazing board, has the dq6, or watercooled, no way that's possible on a ds3 unmodded. The ds3 is no where near the top for overclocking, it just happens to be a great one for the price, you either are thinking of a completely board, or you are mislead. To clarify things, give me a link to the ds3 you are thinking of, I know for sure gigabyte's doesn't hit 500fsb unmodded


For the dfi board, I'm not surprised, dfi's boards have proven to be great overclockers and I had already seen that previously so I knew they had a special board along with their rd600
Click to expand...
Check the 2nd chart... :? Quite a few P965 boards hitting ~500MHz.

Anandtech's P965 Roundup

In our overclocking tests the ASUS P5B-Deluxe WiFi-AP was absolutely superb and clearly offers the best overall performance. In additional testing we have taken our sample up to 545FSB while retaining perfect stability. With the latest BIOS releases we found our Gigabyte DQ6 and DS3 boards were both able to reach or exceed the 500FSB level with our Micron D9 based memory while also providing very good stability, at the expense of slightly looser MCH and memory timings.

We just recently received another BIOS update for the Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 that resulted in a final 7x485 overclock.
Click to expand...

😀 😀
 
#1 - Scratch off the E4400.
The E4300 with DDR2-800 and a FSB will hit 3.6Ghz.

The Higher Multiplier of the E4400 will not really gain you anything.

#2 - The price difference between the E6420 and E6600 is quite small so I would lean toward the CPU that is tested to run at the speed and may lead to the best OC or at least a more reliable high OC.

The question then comes down to the E4300 vs the E6600.
The E6600 is clearly the better chip.

If you have the extra cash get the E6600.
If cash is a little tight, will getting the E4300 allow you to upgrade other parts? If so, it is likely those other parts may give you a bigger boost than the E6600.
 
I'm also looking at these processors, but from a different point of view.

I'm building a media PC that I'll have in my living room inside a nice looking piece of furniture, and mainly use it to show movies. Therefore the main goal is to keep the noise down, and when it comes to processors every used Watt is a Watt that needs to be lead away (most likely by some fan) and that is noisy.

Of course, I'd like some power in the CPU if I start some game there, but then the noise isn't as much of an issue.

So, the safest bet seems a E4300, but how much more heat will a E6320 generate? They don't differ much in frequency, and I haven't found any specs about the power consumption at different loads (apart from http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=337&pgno=4 which says that they have the same 65W TDP).

Any ideas or suggestions?
 
Can you underclock an e4x00? I'm not sure if there is a motherboard that will let you clock the FSB that low on a C2D.

Id say either an undervolted e4300 @ stock speed or an undervolted underclocked e6xxx. But if you're sacrificing performance and underclocking anyway I'd consider a low-wattage AM2 CPU. The 65w (low-wattage models) of an AM2 CPU includes the memory controller so it's actually less wattage at the system level. (And they are like half the price) Also, you could get a single-core AM2 CPU and with a little undervolting you should be able to get the processor w/ IMC under 30watts for about 1/4th the price and 2/5ths the power dissipation of an e4300 but that might not be fast enough for yah.
 
I'd recommend the E6600 as it's now a much more reasonable $230. If you can't afford to spend $230 on the E6600, I'd suggest an Athlon 64 X2 as AMD has a little better price-performance than Intel, but the E6600 at $230 is about as good of a deal as is out there today. That's exactly the chip I'd use if I were building a new single-socket machine today.
 
Mobile CPUs that are based on desktop CPU architecture have used low FSB, low voltage, high multi to save electricity while keeping core clock speed high and I'm pretty sure they were right.

"Never lower FSB"? Why not? 178x9 should use less electricity than 200*8 (especially if that whole NBCC multiplier thing is true), right? You loose a little FSB bandwidth but that's not the end of the world. If you're already going from 533fsb to 400fsb what's the big deal about dropping down a bit more? Heck, you already gave up a massive 2ghz HT pipe by choosing Intel instead of AMD so obviously FSB bandwidth isn't at the top of your list.

I underclocked my P4 Northwood from 133mhz FSB to 100mhz FSB and left the multi at 20 not too long ago. (I had it at 160*18 for a long time but I wanted to reduce heat and power).
 
The days of horrible FSB bottlenecks are long gone (ah, the glory days of OCing when raising FSB gave more than linear increases in gaming performance even if you had to lower the multi to do it)... do you have any data to show that it's a bad idea?

When a 1.8ghz 200*9 e4300 is only 1-3% slower depending on task than a 1.86ghz 266*7 e6300... yeah. Not so worried about exponential loss of performance by further lowering the FSB.

CPUs don't go from dog to awesomes by increasing the FSB anymore. Also, the e4300 *is* a modern celron 😉 And the celeron 300a was the fastest chip of it's day once you OCed it.

Heh, now I totally want to go and put one of those "Intel Inside Celeron" stickers on your computer case. I have one around somewhere...
 
I agree with you.
I just got the 6400 over the (10x)4400 just because I wanted the VT and I was expecting to replace this in a year anyway.
However, when the Penryn comes out, I will get super-high-end quad-core version! Probably the last CPU my mobo can fit and the last cpu for me for a long time.
 
Yes, they do. Raise the FSB strap on the E4300 from 200 to just 266Mhz, and you'll see an improvement in performance. Not necessarily large, but a improvement still.
Click to expand...



If you took an e4300 and clocked it to 7x266 it should bench about 3% better (just like an e6300), yes? The only problem with that statement is that it *is* 3% faster so a 3% increase in performance isn't too impressive. That's 33% more FSB and 3.4% increase in core speed with only ~3% increase in performance in benchmarks that I recall (here's one: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2duo-e4300_5.html). Am I missing something?

At some point if you lower the FSB too much it will certainly start to bottleneck stuff all over the place but that depends on the app and e4300 seems to have some overhead available there for at least some applications. At 100mhz (with no data rate multipliers) my old Duron CPU was a dog. Overclocking it (and the ram) by 12% (which required opening the case and pointing a giant fan at it) would give me almost 50% more FPS in Quake3. I think you could clock an e4300 as low as 166mhz FSB before it really started to hurt (based on my impression that when AMD's 333mhz FSB went mainstream FSB bottlenecks became a thing of the past).

I could be wrong. If you have any data to prove me long I would thank you profusely for bringing it to my attention. But I've build systems around many low-end CPUs from intel and AMD (I've got a K6-2 system still running that's 33% OCed, and I even had a cyrix system briefly) and the world "celeron" doesn't scare me 😉
 
my e4300 @ 3.294 ghz on middle of the pack after market air cooling pulls down 16.844 sec in SuperPI 1M... Not too shabby for sub 130 CPU with only 2megs of cache, although I think having 2megs vice 4(including previous e6300+e6400s with 2megs disabled) of cache helps the chip to run slightly cooler, at least that has been what I have noticed I never go much beyond 50C...

1mpi3294mhznbstrap1066raa8.jpg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom