Core 2 Duo E7200 will be a great alternative to Core 2 Duo E6600. It was faster or achieved the same performance as Core 2 Duo E6600 in almost all tests we conducted (the only exception was on Quake 4 with no image quality settings enabled, where Core 2 Duo E6600 was faster probably due to its larger cache).

Good news is that this forthcoming CPU achieved the same performance as Core 2 Duo E6700 in almost all tests, even though it runs at a lower clock rate and has a smaller memory cache. This can be explained by the different core they use, probably proving that the 45-mm Penryn core is more efficient than the previous 65-mm core. The only times we saw Core 2 Duo E6700 being faster than Core 2 Duo E7200 was on PCMark Vantage overall score, PC Mark Vantage’s Communications benchmark and Quake 4 with no image quality settings enabled.

If you have an application with SSE4 support this CPU will be terrific, as 65-nm Core 2 Duo don't bring support to this new instruction set. When we enabled SSE4 support on VirtualDub performance increased 24%, showing the power of SSE4.

Thus for the average user Core 2 Duo E7200 will be a great alternative to both Core 2 Duo E6600 and Core 2 Duo E6700.

Core 2 Duo E7200 showed a tremendous overclocking capability and here in our lab we could set it running at 3.35 GHz internally and 353 MHz externally, a 32.41% increase on the CPU internal clock rate. We honestly hope that the Core 2 Duo E7200 that will reach the streets has the same overclocking capability than the engineering sample we’ve got from Intel. If this is true you will be able to easily transform your Core 2 Duo E7200 into a higher clocked CPU.