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And so Intel - for the past few years the poor relation to AMD where desktop performance is concerned - suddenly comes along and says, "Hello, here's our new desktop processor". I put it in a test rig and it knocks my socks off. But that's not the end of the story.

Computing power is a wonderful thing, but a means not an end. It inspires the creation of new applications and makes previously impractical ones viable; it means scientists can gain an insight into complex systems and fold proteins to find cancer cures. But to leagues of pasty-faced teenagers, all it does is allow them to make endless forum posts reporting their latest benchmark figures and how they think that maybe they can get another 0.2% and they can't wait until [insert processor codename of your choice here] comes out and they'll definitely be getting one of those and it might even get 10,000 SillyMarks. What fools!

And then it came to pass that I spent almost an entire weekend benchmarking like an idiot. Tweaking settings. Defragging the disk once more just to make sure. Setting the PC Pro benchmark suite going. Watching as the first few tests streaked across the screen. Trying to work out if it looked faster than it did last time. Drifting distractedly away and constantly checking my watch until the final figure popped onto the screen about four hours later (PC Pro's benchmarks aren't kind to a machine and take that long to arrive at an official publishable result). Then immediately feeling dissatisfied - despite the fact that the set of figures I was getting were higher than anything I'd ever seen -

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because I was sure that if I just tweaked that a bit and set it going again then another four hours later I might see an abstract number on the screen that was 0.1 higher.

I'd flung myself into the bottomless abyss of the benchmark obsessed, a self-defeating universe of exponentially diminishing returns and ever-higher dissatisfaction, which is also populated by hi-fi nuts and people who like to customise their cars. I have to admit it was fun for a while.

Now that I've emerged, blinking, into the light of the normal, I've remembered I don't have a need for that kind of CPU power. My main requirement of a PC is that it be fast but quiet.

The easy route to a quiet computer isn't to spend a million pounds on outlandish cooling kit: that's treating the symptom, not the disease. The disease is power consumption, and if you reduce that you reduce heat output, and if you reduce heat output you can slow all your fans down, and if you can slow down all your fans your PC won't make as much noise.

That's the real blessing of Core 2. Intel gets my thanks for waking up to the fact that raw speed is only half the problem. Increasing computing performance for the mass market is now only a valid endeavour if you also reduce power consumption. To be fair, I'm sure Intel's engineers have been more than aware of this for at least five years, but the marketing machine had to keep pumping out nonsense about Pentium 4 with almost as much gusto as Pentium 4s themselves pumped out heat.

Not only has the company produced a processor that consumes less power than my old Pentium 4 while being far faster, it comes in the same physical package, so my Zalman high-efficiency CPU cooler can be pressed into service on the new chip. It's designed for CPUs that chuck out 100W; with a 2.16GHz E6400 in place consuming well under half that, its fan doesn't even need to spin. The power supply is under less strain so it kicks out less heat, reducing internal case temperature. Accordingly, if the case's temperature is low, its cooling fans don't need to spin as fast, if at all. Suddenly, in one fell satisfying reverse avalanche, my desktop PC is quiet as a sleeping mouse.