My brief encounter with Core 2

A friend of mine got hold of a Core 2 Duo E6700 from somewhere, and brought it over to my place just to check whether my setup is fully compatible with the chip. I have a P5B with 2GB Corsair 800 MHz. I am still waiting for my own E6700. Meanwhile, I am running it using P4 560 3.6 GHz with HT. I mainly use the computer for video encoding. Now let me remind you, when it comes to video encoding, P4 560 itself is a pretty strong chip. It can transcode DVD-quality MPEG-2 in real time, which itself is pretty impressive, I think.

When my friend showed up with his E6700, I poped that into my box, and proceeded to install the heat-sink. My friend advised me not to install the heat sink completely, but to just place it on the CPU. I didn't mind--afterall it was his CPU. We did that, and then booted the computer. It booted up in less than 30 seconds. Then I ran a short trans-coding test--DVD-quality, 20 min clip. To my surprise, Core 2 encoded it in less than 10 minutes. That was insane!! Mind you, I had not overclocked the system, and the heatsink was barely sitting on the CPU. And the whole time, the CPU temperature was well below 50 deg C. It was really sad that I had to return that chip.

I would just love to see what this baby can do when I overclock it to 3.6 GHz. I think it will be simply insane.

I hear FX-62 can barely manage DVD-quality transcoding in real time. In Dr. Sharikou's terms, it means E6700 "frags" FX62. Too bad--Intel $550 chip frags AMD's $800 chip. AMD's BK is certain :).