Conclusion: Overclockers Wait! Everyone Else Go For It

Core 2 Duo Wolfdale remains an excellent new CPU that provides substantial performance while reaching new records in efficiency. We drove the processor all the way up to 4.3 GHz, which has been the limit for our test sample. Since this is only the beginning of the 45-nm generation, we expect future models and future steppings to deliver even better overclocking margins. We’re also not sure whether it was the CPU core or the system bus that created the bottleneck that prevented higher clock speeds from being reached, as 4+ GHz can oftentimes be reached with the predecessor, Core 2 Duo E6000 Conroe. However, the 45-nm Wolfdale was optimized for performance per Watt instead of clock speed, and it clearly beats the 65-nm Conroe in all efficiency benchmarks and delivers better performance at decreased power consumption both in idle and under maximum load.

We found it amazing to see the dual-core Wolfdale beat the quad-core Yorkfield when it comes to SYSmark performance per watt. Clearly, combining two Wolfdale dies inside a physical processor, which is how Intel creates a quad-core processor, does provide much better performance (as you could also see in the overclocking charts), but the power consumption increases more than the level of performance. Even better thread optimization might help, but the results underscore our previous conclusion: Core 2 Duo E8000 is the most reasonable processor choice unless you really need much more performance. Please look at our CPU Charts for performance comparisons between the new Core 2 Duo Wolfdale processors and a long list of AMD and Intel CPUs.