AMD Athlon X2 7850 vs. Intel Pentium E5300: Choosing the Best $70 CPU

$74 Gets You Faster than any Pentium 4 Ever Made

The Pentium E5300 is very similar in clock speed and cache size to some of the original Core 2 Duos that launched in the summer of 2006. You may recall that Intel offered both 2MB and 4MB L2 variants of the Core 2 at launch. The E6300 and E6400 both had a 2MB L2, while the E6600, E6700 and X6800 all had a 4MB L2.

The Pentium E5300 is based on the Wolfdale core, which is faster than the original Conroe based Core 2s - but it only has a 2MB L2 like the old E6400. The E6400 however ran at 2.16GHz, the E5300 runs at 2.60GHz. In other words, today’s $74 Pentium E5300 is faster than the original Core 2 Duo E6400.

But the comparison gets even more interesting. Remember that the E6400, at launch, was faster than even the fastest Pentium 4 - the dual core, four thread Pentium Extreme Edition 965 running at 3.73GHz. The charts below from my original Core 2 Duo review show just that:

Do you see where I’m going with this? While the data above is old, it shows that the E6400 was faster than the fastest Pentium 4 ever released. And the $74 E5300 is faster than the E6400, therefore the Pentium E5300 is faster than any Pentium 4 ever released.

Most people didn’t have 3.73GHz Pentium Extreme Editions in their systems - they had lower clocked versions, in which case the E5300 should be even faster. If you had a 2.8GHz Pentium D, I’d expect the Pentium E5300 to be anywhere between 20 - 40% faster regardless of application. Mmm Moore’s Law.

The Test