The PC Perspective Podcast is your weekly stop for the latest PC tech news and reviews! Give it a listen!

Summary

Please Digg This story to share it with others!

Update: July 28, 2006

• Cinebench v9.5 results added to pages 6 and 7 (here and here)
• 3DMark 05 and 3DMark 06 results retested and confirmed accurate

The following is a summary of the more detailed inspection of Intel's latest mobile Core 2 Duo CPU. For all the charts and pictures you'd expect from us, be sure to click this link to get all the details!

Click this link to get the full article

Also, though this review tests the mobile version of the Core 2 Duo against the Core Duo Yonah, you might also be interested in reading our desktop Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme review that compares them against AMD's flagship processors as well. 

Last week Ryan showed (and even before that) the world that the latest desktop Core 2 Duo CPUs (aka. Conroe) from Intel can take anything AMD can muster and firmly grinds them into a fine powder in performance, power consumption, and price. Not to be forgotten are the mobile counterparts to these new CPUs -- known to the world as Merom. This new mobile CPU is the successor to the wildly successful Yonah Core Duo CPUs and comes with many new improvements including EM64T (Intel x86-64 extensions) for 64-bit processing.

The T7400 Core 2 Duo processor we are looking at today uses the exact same pin package as the Yonah CPU. You will find that these new mobile Core 2 Duos will fit into old Yonah laptops, but not every motherboard will be able to run it due to changes in voltages. We will be plugging in the T7400 into a wide selection of laptops from Asus and Dell in the future to see if we have any success getting the systems to run.

The Intel Core 2 Duo T7400 on the left, and the Core Duo T2600 on the right.

Unlike the desktop brother, the mobile Core 2 Duo does not show a massive, across-the-board leap in performance. Rather, the mobile Core 2 Duo takes a step (not a leap) forward when it comes to general system performance improvement. The big improvement is in its number crunching ability which was something sorely missed on the original Core Duo. Not to be forgotten is the larger 4MB cache, and finally 64-bit processing on an Intel Centrino laptop!

But how do you improve on an excellent mobile chip anyway? Unlike the desktop CPUs where there was a lot of room for improvement, Intel's mobile CPUs were in excellent shape already. Though the jump in performance isn't as massive as the desktop Core 2 Duo, the improvements Intel has put into their new laptop processors is significant and maintains their dominance in the mobile space.

The Intel Core 2 Duo T7400 will be available at your favorite retailer soon enough, but in the meantime there are some great deals on T2400 to T2600 Core Duo CPUs. Use our handy PriceGrabber service to find the lowest price including shipping!

Click here for the Detailed Review