First post, by Almoststew1990
- Rank
- Oldbie
I've long thought Socket 775 was a bit boring, being cheap, reliable and modern and found everywhere. Whilst there is a wide range of CPUs on the socket there hasn't really been much point to not using an E8400 for about £3 (or a Q6600/8200 for about £8). I've never really bothered exploring the rest of the CPUs because the naming convention is fairly hard to understand and they're all dirt cheap now anyway!
To get my head around the massive and unhelpfully named CPUs on the socket, I decided to do the Super Mega Benchmark Run 9000, to compare CPUs from the wide range of series on the socket. How did CPU performance progress on the socket from 2004 to 2010?
I considered buying at a certain price point to see what performance £150 got you in 2004 and 2010, but that wouldn't allow a comparison between the different series (Celeron, Pentium etc), not to mention different prices available online on CPU-Word and Intel's Ark (RRP, per 100 units etc). In the end I settled on comparing a bunch of CPUS at one clock speed. I picked 2.6GHz as this includes the majority of the different Socket 775 CPU ranges. Here is a "mostly" complete breakdown of "native" Socket 775 CPU series', including the 9 CPUs I bought (feel free to nit-pick the table):
- 2.667GHz Celeron D 331 (64bit stand in for the 330)
- 2.667GHz Pentium 4 506 (64bit and later entry-model without HT)
- 2.667GHz Pentium D 805 (later entry-model with a 533MHz FSB)
- 2.667GHz Core2 Duo E6750 (because E6700s are surprisingly hard to find for less than throw-away money; it has a 1333MHz FSB)
- 2.6GHz Core2 Duo E4700
- 2.6GHz Pentium Dual-Core E5300
- 2.667GHz Core2 Duo E7300
- 2.667GHz Core2 Duo E8200
- 2.6GHz Celeron E3400
The test
For this test I used a cheapo G41 board. It'll support all FSBs and the DDR3 RAM will be able to run as fast as the CPU lets it. I used 4GB DDR3 1600MHz and a SATA SSD. I used an AM2 cooler without its clips and just let its weight stick on the CPU instead of mounting and de-mounting a Socket 775 cooler. I used my ever-present GTX645 (I'm the guy that keeps banging on about the GTX 645) and through monitoring on MSI afterburner GPU utilisation didn't go over 70%
It came out pretty neat and tidy for work-top open benchmarking to be honest!
The benchmarks:
- 7Z Decompression
- Cinebench R11.5
- Crysis Demo CPU Benchmark
- Fear 1 Benchmark
- Fallout 3
- Mafia 2 Benchmark
7 Zip Decompression
I decompressed a manually compressed Crysis Demo install - 1.6GB
Not much to say. Not a huge improvement from Conroe through to Wolfdale, with the cheeky $42 Celeron at the end putting up a good fight! I thought the E4700 and E5300 would perform worse than they did due to not being in the "flagship" Core2 series.
Cinebench R11.5
This was the CPU and not OpenGL test, obviously.
Again, not a huge amount of progress in the Core2 era and the E4700 and E5300 hold up well.
Crysis CPU Benchmark
I set the game and benchmark to 720p Medium settings.
The E8200 begins to show off its cache (at a guess) here with the increased minimums and the E6750 struggling despite the 1333MHz FSB.
Fear Benchmark
I used the Medium CPU and GPU settings for this benchmark.
Not sure what happened here with the E8200, if I was paying attention I would have re-run the test. I love seeing the Celeron E3400 destroy the older Pentium Dual Cores.
Fallout 3
This was a manual benchmark of the "Birthday Scene" in the prologue - one of the most CPU and GPU intense (but also repeatable) parts of the game. 30 second benchmark once the game had faded in measured in MSI Afterburner; 1% lows and average frame rate was measured. I had to manually disable v-sync in NVidia Control Panel, but I still seemed fairly limited to the upper 60s (not GPU bound). These games might have an engine frame rate cap of 72FPS? I ran the game at 720p and default settings.
Not a huge amount of improvement after Conroe but the little Celeron struggled a bit more here.
Mafia 2
I ran the benchmark at 720p medium settings. This was thrown in as a later game that I hoped the later CPUs would enjoy.
It barely ran on the single cores (as you would expect from the game requirements...) and the E8200 started to show its worth a little more here.
Aggregate scores
Two aggregates to show here (I am no mathematician)
The total minimum and average frames per second are shown below, for the 3 minimum FPS and 4 average FPS tested). It's a shame the E8200 is ruined by the FEAR score...
The second is a ranked score. For each test I scored the CPUS 1 to 9 depending on where it placed. 1 point to the best score and 9 to the worst score, for each benchmark. This allows me to include the non-games in some way, but it assumes each score is equidistant or equally weighted... Lowest total score wins, basically.
Conclusion
Well it turns out my prejudice against anything that isn't an E7 or E8 series is unfounded! The later Pentium Dual-Cores and cheaper E4700 appear to offer 90% of the performance of the E8200. However, it's worth remembering that the E6750 was the top of the pack, and slightly refreshed at that, whilst the E8200 is the bottom of the "full fat" E8000 series, and yet the 8200 still beats it. Of course, it's pretty pointless now, as the E8400 is cheap as chips.
The little Celeron put up a good fight too, for a $42 CPU. Who would buy it though? If you were running a Pentium 4 or something else Prescotty then your motherboard wouldn't support the CPU...
This has inspired me to buy the top (reasonably priced today) Pentium Dual Core 950, which appears to have launched for a cheese-curdling $637 (and I bought on eBay for £7), to see if the Celeron can beat it! I've also ordered a E6300, which was $183 on launch it seems.
Ryzen 3700X | 16GB 3600MHz RAM | AMD 6800XT | 2Tb NVME SSD | Windows 10
AMD DX2-80 | 16MB RAM | STB LIghtspeed 128 | AWE32 CT3910
I have a vacancy for a main Windows 98 PC
