This Core 2 Duo E8200 chip is the starting point for Intel's E8xxx line, which stretches up to the E8600.

While this processor has a clock speed of 2.66 GHz, making it technically around 25% less powerful than the E8600 at 3.33 GHz, in our tests, we ound the performance gap between them to be only around 15%.


In 3D games, there is barely any distinction between the top and bottom of the scale with only one or two frames per second separating the two chips.

Things are a little different when compressing files, though, with the E8200 taking 3 minutes 44 seconds to compress the same files as the E8600 did in 3 minutes 6 seconds.

For complex operations like this, and others like 3D video editing and rendering, you'd be better off upgrading even further and moving to a CPU with four cores from Intel's Core 2 Quad range.

Applying a filter to our test photo in Photoshop CS3, another of our tests, took 5 minutes 5 seconds on this E8200 chip, but its clock speed equivalent, the Q9400, managed to almost halve this to 2 minutes 44 seconds.

The E8200 is fairly reasonable in its power consumption given how much performance it delivers, but it's a long way from being an energy efficient processor.

Finally, to compare this processor with some of its competitors from Intel's great rival, AMD, it more or less matches the performance of the Phenom X4 9650, a quad-core.