The average 55% performance increase is certainly nothing to sniff at, and speaks to how much overclocking headroom there is when you use low-end Core 2 Duo CPUs.

Conclusion

Our little e4300 manages a 75% overclock and about 155% of the stock performance on the average and about 175% of the stock performance in applications Compare Prices on Core 2 Duo e4300. Those are really convincing numbers and the budget overclocking system appears to be a real price/performance winner on all fronts. But the question remains - can it challenge the big boys, or will it get humiliated by the overclocked high-end machines with faster cores, more cache and twice the number of video cards? Stay tuned for the David-vs.-Goliath overclocking battle results.

Author's Opinion

Bringing the e4300 to this competition might have been like bringing a knife to a gunfight, even though its price/performance is phenomenal. If I could turn back time I'd really like to see how the budget machine would have fared with an e6600 CPU - I suspect a good sample might even have outperformed the big dogs in the overclocking arena. If we revisit the budget overclocking subject, I'll make sure to bring a bigger gun.

The Complete Series Of Articles

• Can we further overclock Dell's factory-overclocked XPS H2C?
• How much more performance can we extract from our high-end build from May's System Builders Marathon?
• Can we overclock a $1,000 budget build so it's competitive with the other two PCs?
• What's Faster Our Builds or Dell's H2C?

Join our discussion on this topic