New Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 overclocked to 5GHz with air-cooling

Posted at: 10:41am 4th August 2008 by Antony Leather

Intel sharpens Wolfdale's claws as E0 stepping dual-cores proves to be stunning overclockers

August should see Intel release its latest dual-core CPU model, the 3.33GHz Core 2 Duo E8600 and with it, a core update for the existing E8500 and E8400 that will see their steppings changes from C0 to E0. The Q9650 and a handful of new Xeons will launch. Early indications are that the new E8600 has plenty of performance potential. Overclockers at Taiwanese site Coolaler.com have managed to boot into Windows with an air-cooled E8600 clocked at 5GHz (using a 500MHz FSB, as the CPU has a 10x multiplier), although this did require a vcore of 1.6v. He later managed to clock the chip to 6.25Ghz using liquid nitrogen.

Both the E8400 and E8500 have already won the hearts of many overclockers, with many chips able to reach 4GHz with air-cooling with relative ease. Like the famous G0 stepping of the Core 2 Quad Q6600, the new E0 stepping dual-cores are already proving to be even more stunning overclockers than their predecessors. The E8500 with the C0 stepping currently retails for approximately £125 inc vat, so the new E0 stepping CPUs should be good value too, especially as you rarely see the benefits of more than two cores in games and applications. If you’re in the market for a new LGA775 CPU, they could well be worth the wait.

The E0 stepping will also feature a change in Platform Environment Control Interface (PECI) implementation which relates to the chip's thermal management and temperature readings; this may address some of the issues seen with the E8400 and E8500 with stuck thermal sensors leading to frozen temperature readings. We’ll be reviewing the new CPUs as soon as we get our hands on them. Also, bear in mind that the new CPUs will likely need a BIOS update so check your motherboard manufacturer’s website before buying one else you may find it’s currently unsupported.

Will you be buying the new E0 stepping E8600? Is it a better buy than a Quad core? Let us know your thoughts.