Testing Methodology

Processor: Intel e4600 2.4GHz & Intel Q6600 2.4GHZ
Motherboard: ASRock 4Core133-eSATA2 R5.0
Memory: 4GB G.SKILL F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ PC2-6400 CL5-5-5-15
Graphics card: Evga Geforce 6200
Hard Drive: 1x Western Digtal Se16 500GB
Power Supply: Corsair CMPSU-620HX 620W
Case: Coolermaster CM 690
Case Fans: 6x 120mm Scythe “E”

In these tests you will see that the dual core e4600 was able to overclock to 2.6Ghz on this board. We will be presenting you with the performance figures for the e4600 at stock, with a 100Mhz overclock and with a 200Mhz overclock. In addition, we will also be running one test with a stock Q6600 for a quick comparison between quad and dual core processors on this ASRock motherboard.

Before get to the test results we would like to mention that this board is a definitely cool running board. Regardless of FSB and even under full load the motherboard temperatures stayed below 19°C. The combination of multiple 120mm fans and effiecent heatsinks does keep it the motherboard temperatures very reasonable.


WinRAR

The popular compression program winRAR includes an internal benchmark program that measures the performance of its decompression and compression algorithms. It does this by using an intensive worst-case scenario set of data. This benchmark is great for comparing processors of different size, speed and even cache sizes as it does not scale linearly with number of transistors or cache that a given chip has. WinRAR 3.71 was used and it was allowed to run for 5 minutes before results were recorded.


As you can see the e4600 did post some very respectable numbers. More importantly the quad Q6600 does highlight that while this ASRock board is a budget board it certainly doesn’t limit the CPU.