Anyone here still use the old Wolfdale CPUs?

[Redaxe]

Referring especially to the E8400-E8600 dual core 2 cpu's.

While they are several years old now they can be overclocked to run over 4 GHz giving them performance well beyond the stock specifications.

Obviously the cpu architecture is superseded and they run on the old DDR2 RAM but with a bit of extra voltage they can closely trail in performance to the newer i5s in most games (with the obvious exception of the most resource intensive - like Crysis 3)

This article here is a couple years old now but it's still fascinating to read
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ivy-bridge-wolfdale-yorkfield-comparison,3487-21.html

Quoting from the article
In the end, we're impressed by the staying power of Intel's Core 2 architecture, especially the 45 nm CPUs tested today. But we’re also saddened that Intel no longer sells budget-friendly processors to enthusiasts, like so many Celerons and Pentiums from the past. While the company clearly made big improvements to threaded performance, memory bandwidth, efficiency, and value-added features, it's a little disappointing that an overclocked Core 2 Duo from four or five years ago can match or beat today's best dual-core offerings. Of course, we're keeping in mind that the E8400 original sold for almost three times as much. But still, it would be fun to disable two of Core i5-3570K's cores and see how a K-series Pentium might have performed.

 

[illram]

I was still using an E6600 conroe until about a year ago. I think I built it around 2006 or 2007. Still plays old games like Bioshock, I think I have some old ATI card in there. Not overclocked even. It's now sitting in my closet unused.

I upgraded it to an SSD a few years ago and bought windows 7 and it was essentially impossible to tell the difference in normal office/internet browsing performance between that machine and a brand new (at the time) i5 2400 PC.

 

[Redaxe]

Nice - That was the first dual core 2 I think? Nice machine in it's time.

 

[Quintillus]

E6600 was in the first batch of Core 2 Duos, yes. A nice improvement over a Pentium D. I recall reading that article in the past; a good read.

Until late spring/early summer, I was using my old Core 2 Duo T7500 laptop equally with my newer i5, with its Conroe-refresh era CPU (Merom/Santa Rosa codename for the mobile part). It was actually about the time I upgraded it to an overclockable CPU that I started using the newer one more, primarily due to better battery life with its new battery vs. the 4+ year old one in the Core 2. It isn't as overclockable as a desktop one, of course, and can "only" hit 3 GHz. But, that is still 25% higher clocks than the desktop E6600, and equal with the E8400 at stock, so I suppose that's not too bad and it's actually relevant in a discussing of the E8400.

Bottom line, the limiting factors for it are that it has a 5400 RPM HDD in it, which is slow even compared to the newer, higher-density HDD in my i5 laptop, and that its 8600M GT GPU is pretty weak by today's standards, and isn't upgradeable to a newer model. Due to these and the nearly-zero battery life, I rarely use it these days. However, after overclocking the CPU to 3 GHz, I did bench it versus the Core i5 520M in my newer laptop (which turbos to 2.66 GHz), and it's only a shade less than 10% slower. So I'd be hard-pressed to notice a different if all else were equal, and the 520M is perfectly good for most games, CPU-wise.

Granted, there are caveats. A Sandy Bridge CPU would get a nice boost over Westmere, and newer ones improve slightly over Sandy Bridge (a decent cumulative boost through to Skylake, though disappointing per-generation). And my X7900 at 3 GHz runs much hotter than the i5 520M, for that slightly-worse performance. It probably also consumes a lot more power in order to stay close in performance, which would kill the battery life if the battery weren't already almost dead. But overall, yes, Core 2 can still do your everyday tasks perfectly fine, and handles many not-especially-CPU-intensive games without a problem, provided the rest of the system is up to the task.

That said in games like Civ, I'd rather have a great CPU and a so-so GPU than vice versa. Slow CPU = long AI turns, and a modern Devil's Canyon CPU should give much shorter turn times than a Wolfdale.

I'm also curious to see whether Civ3 and Civ4 would perform better with the latest Skylake CPUs (6600K in particular), or Broadwell (Core i5 5675C in particular). Skylake has better clocks, but the 128 MB L4 cache on Broadwell may mean it performs better for Civ, as it does in some (though by no means all) other applications. I distinctly remember reports that Civ3 ran a fair amount better on Cedar Mill Pentium 4 CPUs than Prescott Pentium 4s clock-per-clock, with the main difference being Cedar Mill having twice the cache. So I wouldn't put it past Civ to run better on Broadwell than Skylake. So far, however, I haven't seen any tests to put that theory to test.

 

[zulu9812]

I built a computer for my parents using my old E8400 cpu and it's still going strong.