Chinese hardware website HKEPC have posted the first benchmarks of the 3GHz E6850! Maintaining it's 65W TDP the E6850 is clocked at 3GHz and the FSB rises to 1333MHz. The E6850 is realistically only 2-3% faster than the X6800 but the main difference we see here is the price..... $266?!

While this could be incorrect, it seems Intel is fighting back in the competitive pricing ring - and it looks like we have a winner!

In its evaluation, HKEPC benchmarks the E6850 and E6750 models in a variety of apps including Cinebench 9.5, DivX 6.2, LAME, PCMark 2005, WinRAR, Battlefield 2142, and Doom 3. The Core 2 Duo E6850 has a definite edge over the existing Core 2 Extreme X6800, but it does also have a slightly higher clock speed (3GHz vs. 2.93GHz). At the same speed, the faster front-side bus seems to matter less. According to HKEPC's tests, the 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E6750 is only 1.38% faster on average than the 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo E6700. Some real-world apps, like Far Cry, give the E6750 a slightly bigger lead, but there seem to be few major differences between the two chips outside of some synthetic tests.