Intel continues to use the Pentium brand name for its series of downscaled Core 2 series processors between the Core 2 Duo and Celeron lines. Japanese website ASCII.jp spotted a new model under the series, the E6300, originally slated for end of May. A retail box was spotted at a ground store. The most peculiar part of the name is its model number "E6300", which that has been used by one of the earliest Core 2 Duo models. The Pentium E6300 however, is the faster chip. While the Core 2 Duo E6300 is clocked at 1.86 GHz, with 2 MB of L2 cache and 1066 MHz FSB, the Pentium E6300 is clocked at 2.80 GHz with the same FSB speed and L2 cache size.

The Pentium E6300 achieves its 2.80 GHz speed with a bus multiplier of 10.5 (x 266 MHz). It is based on the 45 nm Wolfdale-2M core. The model follows the Pentium E5400 (2.70 GHz, 13.5 x 200 MHz) and falls into the E6000 series for having the 1066 MHz FSB. So in essence, it falls between the E5000 series' use of the Wolfdale-2M core, and the E7000 series' use of the 1066 MHz FSB. ASCII.jp notes its price to be at ￥8,880 (around US $90).

techPowerUp! doesn't tend give much news attention to other site's reviews, other than listing them just under the date each day, but this is perhaps more interesting than most. Legit Reviews has posted an quite thorough comparison between the AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ and the Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 when it comes to gaming - two very similarly priced processors at $184 and $185 respectively. The conclusion by the author is that when running games with AA and AF at normal resolutions, the performance difference it too hard to call, which is somewhat justified. However, when you look deeper into the benchmarks it becomes quite clear that, on two very similar systems, AMD's offering is certainly victorious in the majority of benchmarks, often by quite a noticeable margin (15+ frames per second). In fact, the Core 2 Duo only outperformed the X2 on two tests: it had 0.1 more FPS in Call of Duty 2 with 4 x AA and 16 x AF, and 1 FPS more in Quake 4. Although this test doesn't allow for overclocking potential, it would certainly suggest that AMD may still offer more bang for your buck when it comes to gaming with CPUs costing around $200 at stock speeds.