Amazingly out of the 103 articles and reviews that I published on Legion Hardware last year, there are very few that I really remember working on. Although there were a heap of products that I really enjoyed looking at last year, there were few that really stood out and even fewer that really shocked me. Yet I can remember all the way back to July of 2006 when I published our first Intel Core 2 Duo overclocking performance article.
That particular article was based on the Core 2 Duo E6700, which at that time cost $530 US. That in itself is quite amazing to look back on, given today’s latest and greatest Core 2 Duo E6000 series processor is the E6850 which costs just $279 US. This processor is about to be replaced by a much faster Core 2 Duo E8500 model which should retail at just $266 US, so times have really changed. However what has not changed is the reason for why I can still remember testing that Core 2 Duo E6700 processor.
The overclocking potential of these processors is incredible and it is really unlike anything we have seen before. Although back in the days I was able to push my Intel Celeron 300A processor to 450MHz achieving a 50% overclock, that kind of thing was just not possible with processors exceeding the gigahertz barrier. However, then the Core 2 Duo came along and set the overclocking world on fire! Right out of the box we were able to push the E6700 from 2.66GHz all the way to a completely stable 3.66GHz overclock.
At first we thought this was some kind of magical processor, but then reports from all over started to come in that the Core 2 Duo processors were amazing overclockers. So with very limited experience overclocking the Core 2 Duo processors, I had already managed a 35% overclock which I was obviously wrapped with. Then it was time to test out the E6600, which also managed to reach 3.6GHz with relative ease. Now things were starting to get really serious, with the E6600 producing a 50% overclock without requiring anything stupid on the cooling front.
Since then I have published a number of Core 2 Duo overclocking articles and guides, and today we are once again revisiting a new model from the upcoming E8000 series. Although this series is yet to be officially announced, as I write this guide we were able to purchase an E8400 processor over the counter at the local computer store. While the E6850 is currently selling for $279 US, the E8400 should begin retailing for just under $200 US, which is incredible.
However what is truly exciting about the new Core 2 Duo E8000 series is that it should provide us with a new range of extremely good overclocking chips. Already the E8400 has proven to be a worthy overclocker, reaching new heights. Previously our best Core 2 Duo overclock was 3.8GHz using water-cooling and the E8400 had no trouble smashing this record. Using Thermalright Ultra-120 we have already been able to achieve a stable 4.4GHz overclock and I am sure there is more headroom left yet.
Today though we are going to see how far the Core 2 Duo E8400 can go using both the box cooler and an after-market air-cooler. This guide is aimed at those that are relatively new to overclocking. In the past these guides have gone into great detail describing what all the various BIOS settings do. For this guide I will try and keep things as simple as possible by showing you exactly what we did to reach certain frequencies.
