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Following on from the 3-series chipset introduction at this year’s Computex trade show, Intel has just announced five new desktop products with the new 1,333MHz front side bus speed – one of the selling points on the new chipset. These come just before Intel’s scheduled round of price cuts that will come into effect next week.

Of the five processors that were announced yesterday, one is a high-end quad-core CPU, and the others are aggressively-priced dual-core processors that will refresh the top of Intel’s current dual-core lineup. The fastest dual-core processor of the new bunch, the E6850, is actually clocked higher than the Core 2 Extreme X6800 that was released almost twelve months ago now, yet its expected retail price is about one quarter of the current cost of an X6800. When we say aggressive – it’s clear that Intel means business!

Lower down the range, the Core 2 Duo E6750’s pricing is just as was predicted at the end of June, Core 2 Duo on our sister site, bit-tech.net. Bear in mind that all dollar prices are for batches of 1,000 - but the price in pounds is my estimate at a street price for single processors.

The E6750 then will sit at around $183 or around £115 (inc. VAT) in real money. That’s significantly lower than the Core 2 Duo E6700, which comes with roughly the same performance on a 1,066MHz front side bus.

The trend continues further down the line too, as the E6550 and E6540, which are both clocked at 2.33GHz, are the same price as the E6320 and E6300. This also means that they’re at lower price points than the Core 2 Duo E6420 and E6400. The E6540 and E6550 are essentially the same processor with the only difference being that Intel TXT isn't enabled on the latter (we discuss this technology over the page in more detail). If anything, it’s as if Intel is deliberately pushing these new 1,333MHz FSB processors out into the market to sell more motherboards based on its 3-series chipset.

If we move onto Intel’s quad-core lineup, the trend continues as both the QX6850 and QX6800 are at the same price point. We’ve omitted the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 from the table because it’s not going to be around for very long; it’s being replaced by the Core 2 Quad Q6700, which is practically the same CPU with the only difference being that the Q6700 cannot use multipliers higher than 9x.

Considering the fact that the Q6700 is almost half the price of what the QX6700 is currently priced at, we’d do without the unlocked multiplier and increase the front side bus when overclocking instead – that’s generally the preferred method of overclocking anyway. If you’re looking for a quad-core processor, but the attractively priced Q6700 is out of your reach, Intel has lowered the barrier of entry to $266 or around £160 (inc. VAT) for the Q6600 – final UK retail pricing is not confirmed at this time.

That puts it at exactly the same price point as the Core 2 Duo E6850 – Intel’s fastest dual-core processor. Even though there are several games on the way that will make use of multiple processors (and some will even make use of quad-core), there are undoubtedly going to be some that will find the Q6600 a hard sell over the E6850 largely because of the massive difference in clock speed. Hopefully we’ll be able to answer some of your quad-core concerns over the course of this article.

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