Intel's Core 2 Duo E7200 in the flesh

Intel's Core 2 Duo E7200 CPU is the first of the 7000 series based around the Core 2 Duo architecture. The E7200 is designed to take its place amongst the more value and budget conscious users who don't want to compromise on the performance of their system.

E7200 is the first of Intel's low budget CPUs to be based around the 45nm Penryn architecture. While this may not seem significant, its reduced transistor size means it can pack more on the same sized wafer than the Conroe. The smaller die size means cheaper production as well as a cooler running CPU overall; with cooler running meaning less noise from your system.

For the specs of the E7200 processor, it comes clocked at 2.53GHz. This is slower than the top of the line E4700 CPU of 2.66GHz. While this may seem like a step back, Intel has increased the operating FSB of the E7200 from 800MHz (200QDR) to 1066MHz (266QDR) with a multiplier of 9.5x. Cache on the E7200 has increased from the E4700's 2MB up to 3MB total. This will also give the E7200 a slight boost.

Running CPU-Z 1.44.2 we can see that the core is part of the Wolfdale based core like the E8000 series of Core 2 Duo. The stepping is M0 based and runs at 1.16v which is quite low compared to the older Core 2 Duos running Conroe cores. With the 45nm processor we now get SSE4.1 instructions that help increase the media encoding capabilities of the CPU compared to Conroe based models, so it has quite a few added extras thanks to Penryn's new wide dynamic architecture.