Introduction

Intel's Core architecture has certainly stirred up the CPU industry. It has been nearly two years that the CPU giant had to take a back seat to AMD in the performance ring. While clock speeds did manage to hit a high of 3.8GHz with their 580 Pentium 4 CPU, it just couldn't beat a Athlon 64 clocked at 2.2Ghz - that's 1.6GHz slower and it still managed to kill the highest clocked Pentium 4 CPU on the market.

Intel still tried to pull as much out of the Netburst Architecture as it possibly could by adding 64-bit extensions, Hyper Treading, and even Dual Core, but all this was simply in a vain attempt to make the Pentium 4 based processors more attractive - suffice to say, it didn't work.

Core Architecture is simply a new start for Intel using what was learnt from the Netburst days, combined with what was more architecturally sound, the Pentium M Architecture, that served the Centrino systems so well.

This has now given birth to the Core series of processors. Currently there are two architectures and four families - Core Solo and Core Duo are based on the first instalment of the Core architecture and are aimed at the laptop sector. In the second generation are the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme. These are designed for the desktop market and improve on the mobile based Core series.

Recently we took a look at the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme based processors in terms of the architecture and pitted it against its older Netburst brothers. Today we are going to do something that we didn't get into in our article - Overclocking the processors as far as we can on current readily available motherboards.

We all know how the Pentium 4 overclocks but how well do the Core 2 processors stack up in terms of maximum speed obtainable and it is worth the extra stress on the processor for the extra MHz gain? Today we hope to answer this with our look into overclocking the Intel E6700 and X6800 Extreme processors.