Six weeks ago Intel launched a new top model of its Core 2 Duo series, E8500, operating at 3.167GHz. It's the fastest dual-core processors on the retail market, and will remain so until Q3 when E8600 arrives. Madshrimps has posted a follow-up to its launch review where they overclock it using four different kinds of cooling (air, phase, cascade, and liquid nitrogen) to see how far they can reach and how the performance scales at the different frequencies. Even if we miss water from the test setup, the results are still pretty clear.
A good air cooler is enough for most people. The scaling stagnates after that and beyond phase change cooling there's little to gain, mainly because the frequency doesn't increase by much when you move from phase to cascade to liquid nitrogen.
The article also shows that even though both Intel and AMD have put the frequency war behind them, frequency is still king because of the terribly single-threaded world we live in.
Check out the pictures and charts over at Madshrimps.
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Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 overclocking and performance scaling
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