Identifying Core 2 Duos

Intel hasn’t done itself any favours with the naming and numbering system that it has come up with for the Core 2 Duo range of processors. Each processor in the Core 2 range has a five-digit ‘identifier’ number that refers to a number of features of that particular processor.

These can include the clock speed, power consumption, front-side bus and the day of the week that the processor rolled off the production line. OK, we made that last one up, but Intel states on its website that “these numbers have no inherent meaning” – which doesn’t exactly help to simplify matters.

There are currently four versions of the Core 2 Duo available – with the identifiers E6300, E6400, E6600 and E6700 (the processors in this group test were all E6600 and E6700 versions).

The ‘E’ prefix indicates that they all have the same power consumption (in the range 25-49W). This is in contrast to the high-end Core 2 Extreme X6800, which has an ‘X’ prefix to indicate its higher power consumption (75W).

The other numbers in the identifier should allow you to determine the clock speed, cache size and speed of the front-side bus. However, to simplify matters, we just decided to list them for you in the downloadable pdf table.

This article is part of a group test of £1,499 Conroe PCs.
See also
Chillblast Hardcore 6600 OC
Evesham Solar Plus
Mesh Elite E6600 PCW
PC Nextday Zoostorm 5-7402 Edge PC
Scan 3XS C2D-OC
Apple launches Xeon processor in Mac Pro

Performance graphs and table of features can be read via our pdf downloads

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