Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 v. AMD X2 4200

Let's put it this way, I just put together my system in the last few days and although I have pretty good electronics and computer knowledge. I have zero overclock experience. My system as follows:

Intel E6300
ASUS P5B
2GB of OZC Gold DDR2 800
2x320GB Seagate 7200.10
Pioneer DVR-111D
ATI X1900GT with a Zalman VF-900 cooler

All in an Antec P180B case with a NeoHE 500W PSU.

Since thing have been pretty stable in the last few days, I start playing with a bit of overclocking today.

I played with the GPU first and I was able to go from the default 500 core to 648 and the memory from 600 to 720, This is just using ATI's built-in overclocking tools in the Catalyst Control Center. My 3DMark06 with everything at default was 4326 and with the overclock on the GPU is 4752.

I then played with CPU overclock. Since I have no experience at all. I searched around the web and found a topic in Anandtech's forum on someone using a P5B and E6400 and I just copied the simple steps and made a few changes in the BIOS and I got my E6300 to run at 2.8GHz. My CPU temp is only about 55C and I'm using the stock heatsink from the retail pack. I was told that a aftermarket HS like a Zalman 9500 will be able to drop my temp by about 8-10 degrees. This is faster than a stock Athlon 64 FX-62. and my 3DMark06 went from 4752 to 5302 (and remember that 3DMark is a graphics stress test not a CPU so it's not truely reflective of the CPU speed gain).

I can vouch the aftermarket cooler (like a Zalman) will make them even cooler and the over clocking ability of Conroe is pretty crazy.. Several people I know have them well above 3 GHz with no problems.

I have never done any OCing before either and here's the instruction I found:

under CPU options menu turn everything to disabled
Put your memory at 5-5-5-12 (in the northbridge chipset menu)

The following are in jumper free configuration
Put your FSB at 400Mhz
put your PCI-E clock at 100Mhz
PCI at 33.3Mhz
Memory at 533Mhz(1:1) which will run it at DDR2-800 speeds
memory voltage on 2.1v
CPU Voltage on 1.3625v (to start)
every other voltage setting remain on auto.
disable spread spectrum

This should get you stable in everything at 2.8Ghz CPU

If you know how to get int oBIOS, you can do this. The only thing they didn't mention is that the CPU does get pretty warm with a stock Heatsink ~65C so it might be advisable to get an aftermarket cooler like a Zalman 9500 instead which should keep things under 60C.

Conroe is intel core 2

so you can overclock a E6300 (1.86GHz) to 2.8GHz?

Yep

ha ha, we've come a long way since the bad old days of motherboard jumpers

just remember to go slooooooooooooooooooooooooooooow
overclocking in 500 MHz increments is never a good thing

One important piece where I look at Intel Core 2 Duo for is it is lower voltage and less heat dispatched. I don't care of AMD X2 4200 if is a bit faster, I will still go with the Intel Core 2 Duo.

By the way, not flaming AMD cause i have AMD XP myself now hehe

Heh, that was back in the old pentium and earlier days.

Definitely go for the Core 2 Duo. It is about the same price as that 4200 you are looking at, it performs better in games by a nice amount, and it just completely dominates AMD in the media encoding department.