Intel's Conroe or Core 2 Duo as it has been officially named, is creating as much of a buzz amongst the enthusiats as the Athlon64 did. From what we've read about this CPU, not only does it perform exceptionally well, it also manages to reduce the temperatures and power consumption by quite a bit. This is great for Intel as ever since they moved to the Prescott core, things have not went that well for them with AMD constantly challenging and besting them in both performance and power utilization.

All that is supposed to end with Core2. We recieved an Engineering Sample of the E6600 Core2 CPU and as you can see from the CPU-Z screenshot below, this CPU is clocked at 2.4GHz.

This speed is achieved by running at a 9x multiplier at 266MHz FSB. We initally thought that 4MB L2 cache would be shared between the two cores on this CPU but the motherboard BIOS reported 8MB as total L2 cache which means 4MB per core. As per our knowledge, the E6600 will somewhat be placed in the middle with the E6700 (2.67GHz) and X6800 (2.93GHz) above it and the E6400 (2.13GHz) and E6300 (1.83GHz) below it.

The E6600 was tested on an Intel 965 chipset motherboard along with 2 x 512MB Corsair DDR2-800 memory modules, the 7800GTX graphics card and a Maxtor 7200 RPM 80GB Hard Drive. Keeping the system identical, we have the AM2 Socket based Athlon64 5000+ on an ASUS nForce 590 motherboard, as well as the Pentium D 940 and 955 Extreme Edition CPUs on the Gigabyte 975X motherboard. For Socket 939 CPUs, we used 2 x 512MB Corsair DDR-400 modules and the ASUS nForce4 SLI motherboard.