TR Forums

What modern day CPU is closest to the performance of the Intel Core2 Duo E6850 that came out circa 2007?

Thanks.

My gut feeling would be a dual core pentium and Anandtech's Bench seems to agree.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/59?vs=1256

That's only a single comparison point though, you'd have to look around for people making more comparisons to be sure.

*Edit - Actually it looks like a dual core Celeron would be enough. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/59?vs=1257

It's a shame there aren't more data points in Bench though.

I'm going to say the Haswell-based Celeron G1850. It's a buck more than the G1820 at $46.99. A basic Socket 1150 mATX board is $50-70.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819117301

That being said, you may find used deals that are more attractive. A Sandy Bridge Pentium Dual Core used with a mainboard bundle on Ebay might come down further.

Are you just wanting to know for comparison's sake, to see how far processors have come in the past couple of years?

Well, according to Passmark (a general benchmarking tool), there are plenty of chips that are roughly equivalent to the Core 2 E6850.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/mid_range_cpus.html

Sargent Duck wrote:

Are you just wanting to know for comparison's sake, to see how far processors have come in the past couple of years?

I work at a public library and we upgraded all our PCs. So I've got to get rid of about 100 HP 7800s with this CPU. Might give them to charity or sell them to the public for a nominal fee.

However, it is encouraging so see how far we've advanced.

Sandy/Ivy/Haswell are about 50% better than a core2, clock for clock. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but enough that it's not really that important.

So, a 2.4GHz Core2 duo is going to be equavalent to one of the early sub-2GHz SandyBridge Celerons, and your 3GHz E6850 is outpaced by even the cheapest 2.8GHz Celeron G1840 available today.
It's probably closer to a Llano/Richmond A4 or A6 to be honest, and as slow as that is - it's still perfectly servicable for general use. I'm running AAA 2014 games at 1080p high details on an old Core2 and they're fine.

WhatMeWorry wrote:

Sargent Duck wrote:

Are you just wanting to know for comparison's sake, to see how far processors have come in the past couple of years?

I work at a public library and we upgraded all our PCs. So I've got to get rid of about 100 HP 7800s with this CPU. Might give them to charity or sell them to the public for a nominal fee.

However, it is encouraging so see how far we've advanced.

Look for the poorest public school in your general area. There is always one that either due to low funds, or increasing class sizes, or both, that could use PCs at that level. Plus, if they could use, say fifty, then they have fifty for spare parts if one goes south.

A Core 2 Duo E6850 is still a very useful CPU.

I've been highly impressed with what my living room PC is capable of, and its running two Xeon L5240s (3Ghz Wolfdale... similar in speed to your Conroe 6850s, but with more cache and they're only 40 watts TDP) in an old Supermicro MATX board with a Radeon HD 7750.

When you figure in all of the glorified tablet CPUs that are being used in laptops and even low end desktops these days, the E6850 looks a whole lot better than it does when compared to what a PC enthusiast would buy for cheap system. If you look at your average wal-mart PC you'll find almost exclusively Bay Trail and AMD E1 series CPUs in systems under $500. Your HPs probably have outdated IGPs (GMA 950 or GMA 3100 most likely) but as far as CPU power they're actually more capable than many brand new systems that schools would be buying these days.

LoneWolf15 wrote:

WhatMeWorry wrote:

Sargent Duck wrote:

Are you just wanting to know for comparison's sake, to see how far processors have come in the past couple of years?

I work at a public library and we upgraded all our PCs. So I've got to get rid of about 100 HP 7800s with this CPU. Might give them to charity or sell them to the public for a nominal fee.

However, it is encouraging so see how far we've advanced.

Look for the poorest public school in your general area. There is always one that either due to low funds, or increasing class sizes, or both, that could use PCs at that level. Plus, if they could use, say fifty, then they have fifty for spare parts if one goes south.

Especially if used for, say, teaching some programming skills. That's what the RaspberryPi theoretically is for, and this blows it out of the water many times over.

ozzuneoj wrote:

When you figure in all of the glorified tablet CPUs that are being used in laptops and even low end desktops these days, the E6850 looks a whole lot better than it does when compared to what a PC enthusiast would buy for cheap system. If you look at your average wal-mart PC you'll find almost exclusively Bay Trail and AMD E1 series CPUs in systems under $500. Your HPs probably have outdated IGPs (GMA 950 or GMA 3100 most likely) but as far as CPU power they're actually more capable than many brand new systems that schools would be buying these days.

My high school bought a bunch of i5 desktops.

Not sure why they needed i5s + HDD when i3s + 60GB SSD + HDD would've been more cost efficient...

Also worth checking with HP, if you have a specialized application in mind, is what the maximum CPU support is on these systems. They may support something like an E8600 or even a Core2 Quad. If so, they can be upgraded fairly cheaply off eBay.

ludi wrote:

Also worth checking with HP, if you have a specialized application in mind, is what the maximum CPU support is on these systems. They may support something like an E8600 or even a Core2 Quad. If so, they can be upgraded fairly cheaply off eBay.

My guess is that such an upgrade would costs a significant percentage of the total worth of the system in parts alone. Then you've got to ask yourself, who's going to swap out 100 CPUs?

Firestarter wrote:

ludi wrote:

Also worth checking with HP, if you have a specialized application in mind, is what the maximum CPU support is on these systems. They may support something like an E8600 or even a Core2 Quad. If so, they can be upgraded fairly cheaply off eBay.

My guess is that such an upgrade would costs a significant percentage of the total worth of the system in parts alone. Then you've got to ask yourself, who's going to swap out 100 CPUs?

Yeah, its not likely that they'd be upgraded by a school, especially in large quantities.

If you wanted to keep some for yourself though, they most likely support modified LGA 771 Xeon CPUs, which are extremely cheap right now. You can get a Quad core L5420 (2.5Ghz, 50W TDP, 12Mb cache) for around $20 now. It won't be as fast as a modern Ivy\Haswell based CPU in single threaded workloads, but in multithreaded loads it'd do quite well for the money. Whether it'd really be worth any upgrades would depend on what you wanted the system to do.

Firestarter wrote:

ludi wrote:

Also worth checking with HP, if you have a specialized application in mind, is what the maximum CPU support is on these systems. They may support something like an E8600 or even a Core2 Quad. If so, they can be upgraded fairly cheaply off eBay.

My guess is that such an upgrade would costs a significant percentage of the total worth of the system in parts alone. Then you've got to ask yourself, who's going to swap out 100 CPUs?

I doubt anyone would. But if you had an application where, say, 10 or 15 machines with just a little extra grunt would do the trick, it would be a decent upgrade. I have a couple Dell Optiplex 780s of similar vintage running Win 8.1 Pro on an E8600/4GB (bench PC for electronics experiments) and a Q9400/8GB (HTPC) and they are fast, quiet, and cheap. If those HP systems already have an E6850, then they have 1333MHz RAM and the CPU swaps on those consumer snap-together systems are usually pretty easy because they were designed for rapid assembly.

ludi wrote:

Firestarter wrote:

ludi wrote:

Also worth checking with HP, if you have a specialized application in mind, is what the maximum CPU support is on these systems. They may support something like an E8600 or even a Core2 Quad. If so, they can be upgraded fairly cheaply off eBay.

My guess is that such an upgrade would costs a significant percentage of the total worth of the system in parts alone. Then you've got to ask yourself, who's going to swap out 100 CPUs?

I doubt anyone would. But if you had an application where, say, 10 or 15 machines with just a little extra grunt would do the trick, it would be a decent upgrade. I have a couple Dell Optiplex 780s of similar vintage running Win 8.1 Pro on an E8600/4GB (bench PC for electronics experiments) and a Q9400/8GB (HTPC) and they are fast, quiet, and cheap. If those HP systems already have an E6850, then they have 1333MHz RAM and the CPU swaps on those consumer snap-together systems are usually pretty easy because they were designed for rapid assembly.

If they have E6850s they are most likely DDR2. Possibly DDR2-800, most likely DDR2-667. The newer systems with Wolfdale and Yorkfield CPUs are more likely to have DDR3 equipped boards, but according to intel the 4x series chipsets only go up to DDR3-1066.

Still, if it has an E6850, then you know the FSB is 1333Mhz, so at least it isn't one of the older 945 chipsets which have tons of limitations.

You can't really buy an Intel desktop CPU as slow as the E6850 these days. That said, the E6850 is still a fine processor and would be more than capable in a school or office PC. It can even run many games very well.