Core 2 Duo E8600 overclocked with MSI P45 Motherboard

Balance performance and power consumption. The overclocked processor and graphics cards is the easiest way to improve the performance of the system, ideally, and no cost. However, there are limits to take into account if you want to enjoy a reasonable relationship between performance and power consumption, since more speed translates into a higher energy consumption. We used an MSI P45 motherboard and a Core 2 Duo E8600 to answer this question: what is the clock speed at which a Core 2 Duo processor delivers the best performance / consumption?

P45 and Core 2 Duo, still a good match.
Although now it seems everyone is only talking of Intel Core i7 and the AMD Phenom II, the dear old dual core Core 2 Duo will remain in circulation for several months. Despite the quad core mentioned above provide a significant performance boost, they are more expensive (Intel) and typically require new motherboards, and DDR3 memory. This will apply equally to future new Intel products, such as chipsets Series 5 (Ibex Peak), which introduce the new processor socket LGA1156 and Lynfield. The new products offer better performance, and probably will fill the gap that exists between the Core 2 Quad and Core i7, but the platform will not be much more efficient configuration of a Core 2 Quad - and more expensive. Ibex Peak is as innovative product, which introduces new features. For these reasons, the Core 2 Duo models will remain attractive for a while ', because many applications do not benefit fully from the four cores.

Platform.
We looked around for a suitable basis for our plan to overclock. The choice of a high-end motherboard, equipped with many features for fans, it was certainly a good starting point, but with the intent to keep the cost to reasonable levels, we opted for a mainstream P45 motherboard. To be more precise, we selected the motherboard MSI P45D3 Neo, a model not equipped with highly advanced features - that many users probably do not use it - but however provides overclocking features we needed. The most advanced P45D3 Platinum would have been our choice in the case of quad-core CPU, but for this project to overclock the Neo is more than enough.

Core 2 Duo E8600

MSI P45 Motherboard