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Intel has been taking the PC world by a storm with their Core 2 Duo processors. Since their launch two months ago, Core 2 Duo’s have captured the hearts and minds of enthusiasts with their blistering performance.

Now that the availability of parts is getting better, we decided to follow up our reviews of the E6700 and E6400/E6300 by taking a look at the mid-range Conroe – namely the E6600.

The E6600 runs at 2.4GHz – that is 9x266MHz – and comes equipped with a 4MB L2 cache. You do pay a noticeable premium for the additional clock speed and L2 cache over the ~$215 E6400, which is clocked at 2.16GHz and has only 2MB of L2, but you also save money compared to the more expensive E6700 and the quite expensive X6800… so the E6600 fits in the middle of the lineup.

Our previous reviews have revealed that the E6700 and especially the E6400 overclocked very well, so we are very interested in finding out how well the E6600 will do in that department too!

For more background on the Conroe, please read our launch review of the E6700; by now our readers are going to be familiar with the features of the Core 2 Duo processors (shared L2 cache, three issue integer unit, single cycle SSE2 unit) so we can concentrate on testing the performance of the processor, and showing how it stacks up to other members of its family, and its direct competitors, the Athlon AM2 X2 family of processors.