Intel's Core Duo meets the desktop

MP3 Encoding:

DBPowerAMP, Moby - Play, WAV to 192kbps MP3.

Our MP3 encoding test uncovers one of the T2600's weaknesses. The Yonah architecture is said to have poor FPU performance, and this test seems to highlight that problem. The Core Duo T2600 is the slowest chip on test by a considerable margin. Overclocking the chip to 2.6GHz increases the encoding time to something similar to Intel's Pentium D 950 chip.

Image Manipulation:

Fireworks MX, 162 images; grayscale, 50% scale, export.

Again, the T2600 trades blows with the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ and is a single second slower than AMD's similarly priced chip. It also completed the test in the same time as the Pentium Extreme Edition 965. After overclocking to 2.6GHz, the Core Duo T2600 completed the test in the same amount of time as AMD's fastest single core chip: the FX-57. AMD's FX-60 was four seconds slower at the same clock speed.