$300 Gaming CPU's: AMD 5000+ Versus Intel E6600

I have $300 to spend. E6600 Conroe or 5000+ AM2?

Last week Intel introduced their Core 2 Duo Processors and Legit Reviews covered the announcement by releasing our thoughts on the Intel Core 2 Extreme Processor X6800 and the Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E6700. Both of the processors are at the top end of performance for desktop computers and come with top pricing as the X6800 running $999 and the E6700 coming in at $530. In case you missed our article here is a chart of Intel's upcoming processors and their pricing.

Processor	GHz	FSB	Cache	Package	July 23rd Price
X6800	2.93GHz	1066MHz	4M	LGA775	$999
E6700	2.67GHz	1066MHz	4M	LGA775	$530
E6600	2.4GHz	1066MHz	4M	LGA775	$316
E6400	2.13GHz	1066MHz	2M	LGA775	$224

With AMD being very open about their upcoming price cuts I figured that now would be a great time to look at the rumored prices that are all over the internet this week.

Processor	GHz	HT	Cache	Package	July 24th Price
FX-62	2.8GHz	2000MHz	2 x 1MB	AM2	$799
5000+	2.6GHz	2000MHz	2 x 512KB	AM2	$299
4600+	2.4GHz	2000MHz	2 x 512KB	AM2	$224

According to rumors and leaked information on the internet we are able to see that AMD is going to be cutting prices next week and the price cuts are serious. AMD does not want to give up the price versus performance segment and if these prices turn out to be true we know AMD is serious! Most of today's gamers play on a budget and are finding themselves with their graphics card as the most expensive piece of hardware in their gaming system. Today we take a look at a processor that gamers can actually afford those that are in the $300 price range. That means the E6600 from Intel and the 5000+ by AMD have to fight to the death to see who's the stronger gaming processor. Below the AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ AM2 and the Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E6600 meet for the first time and size each other up.

The Intel Core 2 Duo processor E6600 still features the larger 4MB cache size and comes priced just over $300 at $319. To compete with the Intel Core 2 Duo processor E6600 AMD is going to price down their AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ AM2 processor to just under $300. It's also interesting to note that the 5000+ is running at 2.6GHz, which is 200MHz faster than the clock speed on the 2.4GHz E6600 processor from Intel. It's been a long time since I've run gaming benchmarks where the AMD processor has a faster clock speed. It should also be noted that the AMD processor has 1MB of cache where the E6600 has 4MB.

Without going crazy on the technical details let's take a look at our test system and then see what processor deserves to be in our gaming PC. Since gamers use real resolutions like 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 with AA and AF enabled we ran our benchmarks with settings that you would use at home.

Let's take a look at our test systems and then jump into the games!