The FIRST Core 2 Duo - Can Intel's E6700 Still Hold Up?

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Today we take a look at Intel's Core 2 Duo E6700, the best mid-range gaming CPU from 17 years ago that somehow still can run some games! Despite its age, this processor can still hold up in some low-end modern games, and its $15 price point means it can be found just about anywhere. Equipped with Intel's first-generation "Core" architecture as a part of the Conroe family, the Core 2 Duo E6700 featured advanced technologies like Macro Fusion, and its advanced smart cache set the stage for 8-core CPUs as we know them. You can overclock it, but we'll be running it at its base clock of 2.66GHz and 65-watt TDP. It's not the best choice for any PC nowadays, but it was able to run games like Battlebit very well and proves that age isn't always a factor when it comes to low-end gaming performance.

Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:23 "Core" Architecture Improvements
2:03 So What Does The E6700 Come With?
2:23 Inspiron 530 Installation!
2:57 Problems Upon Problems...
3:47 Running Windows 10
4:01 Cinebench R15
4:18 GTA V 1080p Low
4:42 Battlebit Remastered 1080p Low
5:07 Beamng.Drive 1080p Low
5:24 CS:GO 1080p Low
5:44 L4D2 1080p Low
6:04 Portal 2 1080p Low
6:24 Core 2 Duo E6700: The Conclusion
6:51 The Worst Naming Scheme
7:10 Few More Core 2 Duo Shenanigans
7:36 Now Go SUBSCRIBE!

Script (As much as I could fit):

Hello everybody now those under the age of 15 aren't gonna know what this is but this is the first core 2 duo. It's the e6700 and it actually paved for intel modern multi-core CPUs as we know them. It came out 17 years ago as a mid-range processor but a lot has changed since then. We're gonna take a look at how it holds up in a modern environment with modern games and find out what exactly made this processor so good.

So it's 2005, and the first dual-core chips are hitting the market with Intel’s Pentium Ds and AMD’s Athlon X2 series. At the time Intel was using its problematic netburst architecture and knew it needed a complete redesign if it wanted to stay competitive. So they came out with the Core 2 duo series as a part of the brand new  “core” microarchitecture and the Conroe family.

It was nothing short of amazing and part of their success comes from a thing called wide dynamic execution and macro fusion. Wide dynamic execution basically allows the processor to work on multiple instructions in parallel, rather than sequentially. So CPUs fetch the instruction and decode it into micro-operations called u ops. Then Out-of-Order Execution rearranges the order of uops based on processing availability and dependencies. Macro fusion then combines pairs of these instructions into a single uop, meaning these chips were able to process more instructions per clock cycle than ever before

They also shortened the pipeline to 14 stages down from Netburst’s 31. Having a longer pipeline can actually be beneficial and can allow for higher clock speeds, and in the early 2000s, everyone was trying to clock their chips as fast as possible. But a longer pipeline also increases the penalty of mispredicted branches which forces the CPU to discard its predictions and flush the pipeline. Having a shorter pipeline meant less predicted processing stages were lost and the CPU could recover much quicker.

But arguably the important change was to the advanced smart cache. It uses prefetch algorithms to collect data from the memory controller before it is needed and stores it in the L2 cache. They had a similar setup in their netburst chips, but what made it advanced was its ability to dynamically allocate cache space for both of the cores using an arbitration bus. Previous netburst chips had 2 independent caches connected via the system bus which caused a lot of latency. Each netburst core needed to store its own data even if it was identical to that of the other core. Luckily Conroe fixed this issue with this new cache designed specifically for multi-core chips.

So what did our chip actually come with?

Well, the core 2 Duo e6700 obviously had 2 cores, and also 2 threads with a 65-watt tdp, a clock speed of 2.67 GHz, and 4 MB of L2 cache. Although it didn't have integrated graphics, when compared to modern CPUs, the only feature it really lacks is hyperthreading and support for the SSE4 instruction set which can cause issues in modern games.

Now I bought this CPU for $15 on eBay and threw it in an Inspiron 530 with 8 GB of DDR2 memory, Windows 7, a 7200 rpm hard drive, and an RTX 3060. Generally, a 15-year age gap of any kind is a red flag, but I wanted to make sure the e6700 was not bottlenecked by the GPU. In fact, I considered building an entire High-end LGA 775 setup just to make sure the processor was running as fast as possible.

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