Pentium E6300, previously known as Pentium Dual Core, is a dual-core CPU. Architecture-wise the main difference between the two is the presence of an integrated memory controller on Athlon II X4 620, which supports both DDR2 and DDR3 memories. Memory support on Pentium E6300 depends on the chipset. Since Intel G45 chipset only supports DDR2 up to 800 MHz, we used the same DDR2-800 modules with both CPUs, this way the memory modules wouldn’t bias the results.

Athlon II X4 620 has 512 KB L2 cache per core, so each core has its own L2 cache. On Pentium E6300 all cores access a single 2 MB L2 cache.

Both CPUs don’t support the SSE4 instruction set. AMD CPUs have AMD’s own implementation of SSE4 called “SSE4a,” which has only four instructions and is not the same thing as SSE4 (which has a total of 54 instructions, 47 on SSE4.1 and seven on SSE4.2).

In the table below there is a column called “external bus.” For the AMD CPU this means the speed of the HyperTransport bus. On Athlon II X4 620 this bus works at 2,000 MHz, which translates in a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 8,000 MB/s (2,000 MHz x 16 bits x 2 data per clock cycle / 8). On Pentium E6300 the external bus is called front side bus (FSB) and works at 266.6 MHz transferring four 64-bit data per clock cycle. Because of that, this bus is also referred as “1,066 MHz” (4x 266.6 MHz). This is equivalent of a maximum theoretical transfer rate of 8,533 MB/s (266.6 MHz x 64 bits x 4 data per clock cycle / 8).

TDP stands for Thermal Design Power and tells the maximum amount of heat the CPU can dissipate. The CPU cooler must be capable of dissipating at least this amount of heat.

The prices listed were researched at Newegg.com on the day we published this review.

Now that you know the contenders, let’s see how they performed.