This article won't touch upon "holy wars" (we warn you in advance, if you wonder why no AMD here). These processors are not included, because they are not necessary here. We shall examine two interesting families of Intel processors with 333 MHz (1333 MHz Quad Pumped) FSB, based on the relatively old (Conroe) and relatively new (Wolfdale) cores. On the face of it, they differ only in L2 cache size (4 MB in Conroe and 6 MB in Wolfdale). However, as we already mentioned, these cores have deeper differences. What concerns our selection principle, it's very simple and consequently very informative: we selected the slowest and the fastest model from each series. Thus, even if you are not interested in the comparison of cores, you will still get useful information about performance ranges of two interesting Core 2 Duo processor families.

Hardware and Software

Testbed configurations

• Memory: 4 GB (4 x 1 GB modules)
• HDD: Samsung HD401LJ (SATA-2)
• Cooler: Thermaltake TMG i1
• PSU: Cooler Master RS-A00-EMBA

Software

* Means that two or more simultaneously active threads are actually present during tests; not just the fact that a process generates several threads.