Overclocking Intel’s Core 2 Duo
A new, legal BIOS setting allows overclocking on “locked Core 2 Duos.”
Those of you fortunate enough to own the high-end Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme X6800 have had the added bonus feature of a processor that is unlocked, meaning you could overclock it out of the box. This has not been true true of its less expensive, lower performing brothers, the E6700, E6600, E6400, or E6300. However, the times, they surely change.
The X6800 is a 2.93GHz 4 MB L2 behemoth costing US$999. It is the high-end masterpiece released thus far from Intel. However, ASUS has delivered a new motherboard and BIOS upgrade that allows one to unlock the E-series, providing some notable performance increases and great potential for overclocking, especially in the 2 MB L2 cache size E6400 and E6300 varieties. The 4 MB L2 cache chips do not seem to overclock as well (which makes sense, since there’s more to overclock).
AnandTech was able to overclock the E6700 to 3.5GHz (up from 2.66GHz) and the E6600 to 3.45GHz (up from 2.4GHz). The 2 MB E6400 was able to hit 3.56GHz (up from 2.13GHz), while the slowest E6300 was able to reach 3.68GHz (up from 1.83GHz). These are absolutely amazing overclock numbers! For a $183 investment plus an ASUS motherboard you could have a 2 MB Core 2 Duo overclocked to well over 3GHz, thereby outperforming Intel’s high-end $999 part on a much, much smaller budget.
These chips are overclocking like so:
- E6700 - 132%
- E6600 - 144%
- E6400 - 167%
- E6300 - 201%(!!)
Amazing what they can do at 65 nm.
Read more at AnandTech, and post your thoughts on this extreme overclocker … all thanks to ASUS unlocking the unlockable. 
