Test Report: Mobile Core 2 Duo Okay, Not Great Arlington VA

Eight months ago Intel rocked the mobile processor world with its first dual-core CPUs, which boosted the speed of a notebook performing two tasks simultaneously by 30 percent. Now comes Core Duo's successor, Core 2 Duo, accompanied by Intel claims of even better performance and support for the coming era of 64-bit computing. Should you kick yourself for buying that Core Duo notebook in May?

PC World tests suggest you shouldn't sweat it too much. Notebooks get only a small performance boost with Intel's new processor, formerly code-named Merom, and battery life appears to remain about the same.

The five new Core 2 Duo mobile chips (Intel earlier released five Core 2 Duo desktop processors) are the latest descendants of Intel's Centrino-brand processor and wireless chip set combo.

Core 2 Duo comes in two lines: the T5000, which includes the 1.66-GHz T5500 and 1.83-GHz T5600, and the T7000, featuring the 2-GHz T7200, the 2.16-GHz T7400, and the 2.33-GHz T7600. Intel isn't saying when we'll see a version of the Core 2 Duo for ultraportables.

The Core 2 Duo chip has many of the same features as its Core Duo predecessor: a 667-MHz frontside bus, the 945 chip set, the 3945ABG wireless chip set, and similar clock speeds. The two biggest improvements are the doubling of Level 2 cache to 4MB in the T7000 line, and support for 64-bit processing. The latter brings Intel back on par with AMD's Turion 64 X2 chip and means users can take advantage of upcoming 64-bit applications, including the 64-bit version of Windows Vista. Core Duo can't do 64-bit computing.

PC World tested three shipping notebooks with different Core 2 Duo processors and 1GB of memory: a $1906 Dell M1210 with a 2-GHz T7200 chip, a $2059 Gateway M685-E with a 2.16-GHz T7400 chip, and a $1498.99 HP Pavilion dv6000t with a 1.83-GHz T5600 chip.

The biggest performance increase over notebooks outfitted with same-speed Core Duo CPUs was only 7 percent, enough to shave a few seconds off of day-to-day operations but not much more.

The Windows XP Media Center Edition-equipped Dell M1210 turned in a WorldBench 5 score of 102, 5 percent better than the 97 earned by the average Media Center Edition notebook using a 2-GHz Core Duo T2500. The Gateway M685-E scored 109, 7 percent better than t 2.16-GHz Core Duo T2600-equipped HP Compaq nx9420's score of 101. The HP Pavilion dv6000t scored 101, 6 percent better than a 1.83-GHz Core Duo T2400-equipped Toshiba Satellite P105-S921's 95 with the same 2MB of Level 2 cache.

In sum, Core 2 Duo systems are a tad faster than Core Duo notebooks at handling everything from mainstream applications such as spreadsheets and e-mail to watching DVD movies. And they are just as impressive (and significantly faster than Pentium-Ms) at juggling multiple tasks, like ripping a CD while surfing the Net, for instance.