Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Wolfdale CPU


3DMark and Cinebench



Futuremark 3DMark06
Default Benchmark


Cinebench R10

Multi-Core CPU Rendering Test

These more specific synthetic tests showcase the Core 2 Duo E8500’s strengths and weaknesses.   In a gaming environment, like 3DMark06 demonstrates, quad-cores don’t have a huge advantage as most titles don’t take advantage of all their additional processing power.  In this case, the highly clocked, cache heavy “Wolfdale” dual-cores show excellent performance.  When overclocked to 4.2 GHz, our E8500 dual-core actually beats a 3.0 GHz Core 2 Extreme quad-core.

In a rendering environment, like Cinebench showcases, a quad-core will likely deliver better performance.  While the E8500 showcases better performance compared to prior generation dual-cores, it simply can’t match a quad-core in this arena.   It’s close when the E8500 is overclocked, but a highly clocked quad-core will still deliver better performance.


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