Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 Processor Review

The $133 Wolfdale Arrives – Core 2 Duo E7200

The Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 processor isn’t even out yet, but it is by far one of the most talked about processors in 2008 and with a rumored price of $133 it is no wonder as to why. This means that the E7200 will be priced lower than what you can purchase an Intel Core 2 Duo E4700 for today as it will set you back for $149.99. The E7200 at 2.53GHz is 70MHz slower than the E4700 that currently works at 2.6GHz, but don’t worry as the E7200 has 1066MHz FSB, which is faster than the E4700 that has just an 800MHz FSB. The Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 has a 3MB chunk of L2 cache that should perform better than the 2MB L2 cache found on the E4700. The faster Front Side Bus (FSB) and increased density on the L2 cache should make up for the lower clock speed and make the entry level Core 2 Duo very competitive.

As much as the enthusiast community has been talking about the Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 processor, Intel has been pretty silent about the upcoming processor. This is strange seeing how the launch of it is coming up in the weeks ahead (rumored to be on May 11th, 2008). After the Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 processor arrived here at LR, we had some questions for Intel about the pricing and power ratings and Intel had this to say:

Oh, for pricing, we are not giving that out yet as launch is still just slated for Q2 and it isnt launched yet. I will say however it will fit into our mainstream dual core 65W TDP. – Intel PR

With Intel not sharing any information other than providing us with a processor let’s take a look at what we have and run some numbers! The rest of the information will come out when the launch date gets closer.

With the latest version of CPU-Z 1.44.2, we can see our dual-core ‘Wolfdale’ processor is correctly identified at 2.53 GHz with a 1066MHz FSB and 3MB L2 cache. This is a 45nm processor with the Q-spec code of QAFS. The Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 should be a great overclocker as it has a 9.5 multiplier (266MHz FSB x 9.5 multiplier = 2,527MHz). If you increase the FSB to 333MHz that will make the CPU 3.16GHz and if it could do 400MHz that would make it 3.80GHz! We will try to reach these higher clock frequencies in our overclocking section.

Moving over to the cache tab in CPU-Z the 3MB of L2 cache can be seen. With a larger L2 cache size the Core 2 Duo 7xxx series should be able to perform better than the Core 2 Duo 4xxx series.

Flipping the Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 processor over, some differences can be noted between the various 45nm processors by Intel.