Now it's time for a few DirectX tests.

With frame rates being mostly CPU-limited in older games, the new Wolfdale core beats the Conroe, clock per clock. Newer DirectX benchmarks are essentially limited by graphics card performance, showing much smaller wins for the new 45nm CPU core technology.

Clock for clock there's little to no performance difference between the older Conroe and new Wolfdale cores in SPECviewperf's professional OpenGL benchmark, and overclocking often put the Conroe in the lead. This could be due to the higher bus speed required to overclock our E6750, with the resulting higher memory bandwidth. In the middle, the stock speed of the Core 2 Duo E8500 puts up a good show.

We saw mild to moderate per-clock performance gains for the new Wolfdale core of Intel's Core 2 Duo E8500, but the other promise of this new technology is greater efficiency. Let's see how each core scored in a simple power consumption test.

Power savings of 10W idle and 16W full load put the Core 2 Duo E8500 significantly ahead of the 65nm E6750. The difference in clock speed between these two parts gives even better marks to the 3.16 GHz E8500, as the "E6750-matching" 2.66 GHz Core 2 Duo E8200 would have likely consumed even less power.