Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 invades AMD territory on price/performance chart

From TomsHardware:

The latest round of seasonal CPU charts updates from Tom's Hardware Guide reveals what we expected, now that we've had a chance to test Intel's Core 2 Duo E6400 dual-core CPU: At $247 average selling price, according to today's figures from PriceGrabber, it could be the most powerful CPU you can buy today for the fewest dollars...at least until figures from the E6300 are tallied.

The Summer CPU charts enabled us to make seasonal adjustments to our performance indices, along with replacing performance estimates with across-the-board real-world figures for Unreal Tournament IV and older processors. The new figures give the E6400 a performance index score of 2.74, meaning that in the five categories of tests we've accounted for - applications, gaming, synthetic processing, audio encoding, and video encoding - the THG test system with the E6400 CPU delivered an average of 274% the performance of an old single-core Pentium 4 2 GHz CPU, which currently sells for about $77 on average.

The E6400 is the lowest-priced CPU that THG has tested whose price falls below our projected AMD price/performance curve. Given the assessed performance of all known AMD dual-core desktop processors, a hypothetical AMD processor whose performance index score was also 2.74, would sell for $537.17. And as our new-format chart shows, the nearest real-world competitor to the E6400 is AMD's Athlon 64 X2 5000+, whose index score is 2.72 but which sells for $360.