Digital Home Thoughts: The Dynamic Duo: Intel's Core 2 Duo E6700 CPU & D975XBX2 Motherboard

Day to Day Use
So how does the combination of the Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 CPU and the Intel D975XBX2 motherboard work in day to day tasks? Amazingly well. This machine is fast and incredibly responsive. The install of Windows Vista Ultimate took - get this - 15 minutes from the initial reboot with the CD in the drive to the very last performance benchmark before login. Fifteen minutes to install an OS from scratch? That's impressive no matter how jaded you are.

The Windows Experience Index is a useful way to look at system performance, because every computer running Vista will have a set of five scores. The numbers don't mean much in isolation, but when compared to other systems, they start to give you a good feeling for system performance. At stock speeds after the installation of all drivers, here's how the system measured up:


Figure 5: The Windows Experience Index rating.

I decided to experiment with overclocking the E6700 using the Host Clock Frequency - by default it's set to 266 mhz, and I went up in increments of 5 mhz until I got to 280 mhz - that gave me a CPU speed of 2.80 Ghz by bumping the system bus speed from 1066 mhz up to 1120 mhz. After the bump I ran the Windows Experience Index and the Processor rating inched up to 5.6 and the RAM score went up to 5.6 (from 5.5 and 5.4 respectively).

I wasn't quite ready to give up yet though, because I had read all sorts of stories about how much headroom the E6700 had for overclocking - since it wouldn't boot when the host clock frequency was set to 285 mhz, I tried 300 mhz - and it worked. Bizarre! The CPU was then running at an even 3 Ghz. This is all done without any voltage bump on the CPU - I had a bad experience recently where I burnt out an AMD X2 CPU with a voltage overclock, so I wasn't eager to have a repeat with the Intel E6700.

I tried another bump to 3.2 Ghz but Vista started to crash on boot, so I settled in at 3.102 Ghz. I'll very likely experiment with this further to see how far I can push the CPU and motherboard. One thing is clear, however, there's more performance to be had from this combination. Once I was done overclocking, the Windows Experience Index score for the processor was 5.7 and the RAM was a 5.9. I should point out though that I saw some strange inconsistancies with overclocking: there was more than one occasion where I'd try to push up to 3.2 Ghz, it wouldn't work, then I'd roll back to 3.1 Ghz which was working earlier - and it still wouldn't boot. I'd have to go back to the stock 2.66 Ghz speed before the machine would boot. As I said, further experimentation is in order, because it seems like everyone out there can sail past 3.4 Ghz without much trouble except for me.

To further get a feel for how it will perform in daily tasks, I loaded up Adobe Lightroom with 100 RAW images (828 MB in total) from my Nikon D200. I selected all the images and started a batch "Auto Tone" process - this is almost a purely CPU and RAM-based process, so I think it's a solid indicator of performance. The Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 system crunched through the process in 63 seconds. I also ran Acronis TrueImage from a boot CD that images the hard drive - 13 GB of data in total - creating a 4.8 GB compressed file. Again, this is heavily CPU-dependant task, so I was amazed when it completed in three minutes.