Building a new system rig? Looking for the right processor? Wondering whether Intel’s Core 2 Duos stack up against it’s own Core 2 Quad processors?

Digitlife has just published a new comparison benchmark article between Intel’s “old” Core 2 Duos and its Quads by putting them up against a wide variety of games, multimedia software and even web applications to see which is the better processor for your needs.

This time we’ll try our new test procedure in an interesting but “academic” research. This article won’t feature many new processors. All the four contenders belong to the Intel Core 2 family, and the main problems addressed in this article have nothing to do with the question which model is the fastest.

It’s very interesting to compare quad-core processors with dual-core ones, as the cheapest Intel Core 2 Quad (Q6600) already costs about $200. This price border separates CPUs for well-off users from popular processors on the Russian market. So common users may be tempted to buy a real quad-core processor, even if it does not operate at a high clock rate. We only have to find out whether it’s an objectively expedient decision. Of course, a quad-core processor will always be more expensive than a dual-core processor on the same core operating at the same frequency, it will consume more power and get hotter. Besides, a quad-core processor needs a more efficient and thus either a more expensive or noisier cooler, and probably a more powerful power supply unit… So, if the above-mentioned issues are not compensated by a serious advantage in performance, this whole idea will make no sense. That’s what we’ll find out in this article.

Our contenders include only two relatively new processors - Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 on Wolfdale core and Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 on Yorkfield core. If you are interested in details, you can read our article about Core 2 Extreme QX9650, which describes differences between Yorkfield and older quad-core Kentsfield. What concerns differences between Wolfdale and Conroe, they fall within the description in this article for the only exception - they are dual-core processors.

View the full benchmarks here