Not the fastest, but definitely the best. Of course I won't count expensive special-purpose processors or any of that. Usually when some company releases a new line of processors they go out of their way to create immense hype, then when they finally release the product it is dead expensive. This time Intel were slightly more relaxed about the whole advertising thing. I can safely say that the infamous DirectX 10 or "dx10" as all the gamer nerds call it has more hype surrounding it than these processors.

There is also the E6400 and 6600 and even faster Core 2 processors but it would be stupid to spend so much money on one now. The E6300 beats dead pretty much any commercial mass produced processor out there before it was released except for the extremely expensive high-end AMD processors. It was really surprising that I could get my hands on one of these for less than $200 US. Usually these things would have some outrageous price for even the low-end stuff but Intel are clearly not leaving out the misers in this one. I think the E6300 has made computers in general a lot cheaper - and even the low end prebuilts can have decent processors now where as in the past they were stuck with knock-off brands such as "Celeron" and "Sempron" that immediately belittled their status. Even if one bought an expensive Celeron in its heyday people immediately lost interest as soon as they heard the word Celeron.

The E6300 comes with new instructions such as SSSE3 which GCC 4.3 will be able to use once it's released. As the name suggests it is a dual-core processor. Which basically means its like two processors in one. To the user it appears like there are two processors, but when you look in the computer you only see one. Commission-based sales people have attributed all sorts of god-like powers to dual core most of it is a pack of lies. For instance you don't need special Vista-enabled versions of the latest commercial software to take advantage of it - almost anything you run will have some benefit out of it. The main advantage is that something in the background can sit there uninterrupted using up 100% of a CPU [which is merely a core] while you carry on about your daily business without noticing anything being slow. There are applications out there that are 'threaded' and will use both cores - but many of these don't use 100% of both. Writing a threaded application is pain in the asre and completely pointless for most things.

Only the type of software that uses a whole lot of processing power for a sustained period will really benefit from it. Still I would never go back to the dark days of having only one core because it speeds stuff up so much if you are doing a few things at once. Even system processes that you never look at will be distributed over the 2 cores.

The E6300 is a 64-bit processor. For most people that doesn't mean much as most people who read this still use Windows and the vast majority of Windows users are still stuck in a 32-bit world. There are many operating systems out there that do support the whole 64-bit thing, even 64-bit windows if you choose your hardware correctly. There is the whole thing with stuff not running on it so it will take a few years for 64-bit systems to get more common. Any good Linux distro will have 32 and 64bit packages available at the same time so compatibility is rarely an issue if you try to run an old 32bit binary. I am however still using 32 bit Firefox because of issues with plugins and that. There are a few other things that I use that are basically relics from the 32-bit world. Not much marketing hype has gone into it just yet because Microsoft's offerings are severely lacking in this area. Really it just means you can store more bits in a variable but it does seem to make the system a bit faster.

I got this processsor in the retail box with all the fancy packaging and the heatsink because I don't like to go out and spend more on a seperate heat sink and fan. The box was a pain to open because of the way they packed it in some sort of moulded 'bubble-pack' style plastic. It has all the manuals that shows you how to install it and a bit of thermal goo on the heatsink so basically all you need to install it on your motherboard. The chip itself is about the size of the Pentium 4 chips but easily recognisable by the way they have made space around the outside of the chip for the metal clasp that is used to hold it down on the motherboard. They also got rid of pins - the chip has little hemispherical connectors that hopefully don't bend all the time like they often did on other processors.

On a not so warm night like today and not really doing any work it is about 38 degrees. The fan is running at about 1000 RPM which means its nice and quiet. I don't have any complaints about the fan and heatsink that they included so if it aint fix don't break it! I can overclock the processor but only to 2GHz. This is apparently because I have very bad RAM - other people are able to get them to 3GHz without any trouble. It does generate a bit more heat running at 2GHz so the fan speeds up. My computer also crashed because of it once [normally it never crashes] but only after being up for over a day.

This processor is definitely a lot faster than the Dual Opteron 240 I had before it, and the 1.7GHz Pentium 4 I had before that. If you told me I would be upgrading to a 1.86GHz processor five years ago I would have been disgusted. But regardless of the megahurtz it is so much faster. It can run SuperPi [32 bit, 1 core] in 22-23 seconds. I havn't really done much benchmarks with it other than that. It can compress a 15MB file to PAQ8G format in about 15 minutes. It is also great for encoding videos or any of that sort of stuff. I havn't been able to play any games on it because right now I'm stuck with 8MB of shared video ram.

The CPU multiplier can be set to 6 or 7 which isn't really a lot of good. I run the processor at full speed all the time but it is possible to use a frequency governor.