Upon visiting my local computer store late last week to purchase some graphics cards, something else caught my attention. On the shelf was a Core 2 Duo box that I did not recognize and on the front it featured a large green sticker labelled “45nm 6MB L2 Shared Cache”. Right then I knew that could only mean one thing and that was that the new 45nm Core 2 Duo processors where here; yep, I put two and two together rather quickly, I know.

Anyway, it was the E8400 that they had in stock and since I was not due to receive one of these processors from Intel for at least another week yet, I snapped this up without hesitating. Although I was already aware of the suggested retail price of $183 US for the E8400, it was hard to gauge how expensive this newly released processor would actually be, especially in Australian dollars. After all, a good price here for the Core 2 Duo E6850 is roughly $330 AUD.

The E6850 is a 3.0GHz, 65nm, 4MB L2 Cache, dual-core processor while the E8400 is a 3.0GHz, 45nm, 6MB L2 Cache, dual-core processor. Although I was aware that the E8400 was supposed to be cheaper, I really did think this was wishful thinking. All that wishful thinking paid off as I was asked to front up just $244 AUD for the E8400, which is really quite incredible. The E8400 is a member of the “Wolfdale” family which is based on the Penryn architecture. While Intel has delayed most of their 45nm processors for now, there are three new Wolfdale processors which were supposed to be officially released on the 20th of January.

This new family consists of the E8200 which comes clocked at 2.66GHz, the E8400 (3.0GHz) which we have here today, and the E8500 which is the first Core 2 Duo processor to exceed 3.0GHz, running at 3.16GHz! Apparently there will also be a version called the E8190 which will be very similar to E8200, but without the virtualization technology support. All these E8000 series processors feature a 6MB L2 cache and use the 1333MHz FSB. The pricing for these processors is as follows; E8500 $266, E8400 $183, E8200 $163 and the E8190 is also said to cost $163 which is interesting.

Today we are more or less just giving you a preview of the Core 2 Duo E8400, with just a limited amount of benchmark results. Later next week we plan to post an overclocking guide featuring the E8400 which will include a lot more information regarding power consumption and temperatures, as well as overclocking performance. This preview quickly compares the E8400 to the E6850 as they are both 3GHz Core 2 Duo processors, while the quad-core QX9650 has simply been thrown in for comparison...