With Intels Core Duo 2 out and the 975P chipset, its way out in front in terms of performance. However, AMD has just dropped all their processor prices, so if you don’t overclock, at the budget level, get an Athlon X2 3800+ over a E6300 1.83GHz
However, if you go up even a little bit, then the E6400 2.16GHz is a great buy. When overclocked, it is litterally a tremendous performer, so its the dream processor.
Finally, if you don’t overclock and want very good performance, then the E6700 is the ticket. It has a 2.4GHz and 4MB cache and also runs faster. Unfortunately, right now in China, you can’t get the E6700 nor the new 975P chipset with the faster 1066MHz RAM, so if you live in the US, get an overclocking board, if you live in China, then wait for Dell to trickle down their E6700/975P computers.
AnandTech: Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 & E6400: Tremendous Value Through Overclocking
The E6400 finds itself in between the X2 4200+ and X2 4600+ in price, but in performance the E6400 generally lands in between the 4600+ and 5000+. Once again, with these 2MB parts the performance advantage isn’t nearly as impressive as with the 4MB parts (partly due to the fact that their native clock speed is lower, in addition to the smaller L2 cache), but even with AMD’s new price cuts the Core 2 is still very competitive at worst. If you’re not opposed to overclocking, then the E6400 can offer you more than you can get from any currently shipping AMD CPU – our chip managed an effortless 2.88GHz overclock which gave us $1000 CPU performance for $224
