Intel Xeon E5-2420 vs Intel Core 2 Duo E8600

Xeon E5-2420 vs Core 2 Duo E8600 comparison

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark tool, the Xeon E5-2420 is faster than the Core 2 Duo E8600. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core 2 Duo E8600 in all gaming tests too.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Xeon E5-2420 has significantly more cores with 6 cores compared to the Core 2 Duo E8600 that has 2 cores. It also has more threads than the Core 2 Duo E8600. Our comparison shows that the Core 2 Duo E8600 has a significantly higher clock speed compared to the Xeon E5-2420. The Core 2 Duo E8600 outputs less heat than Xeon E5-2420 thanks to a significantly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

Most CPUs have more threads than cores. This technology, colloquially called hyperthreading, improves performance by splitting a core into multiple virtual ones. This provides more efficient utilisation of a core. Indeed, the Xeon E5-2420 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.