Incredible bang for buck - Intel E21xx cpus!

I finally decided to switch to the "Dark Side ". I ordered an E2180 dual-core cpu with a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L board and some DDR2 800Mhz RAM.

What was holding me back was cost. Looking at various parts, the cost was still too rich for my blood - considering I have a decent AMD gaming rig. To see why I finally "bit" and went with that cpu, take a look at the chart on this page about 3/4 of the way down comparing an overclocked E2160 with an Core 2 Xtreme X6800 cpu. The viciously overclocked E2160 beats out the stock-clocked X6800 in almost every benchmark.

The E21xx series is called a Pentium but that's a marketing decision. It really has the same architecture as a true Core 2 Duo but with only 1MB of on-die L2 cache. The lack of cache hurts the E21xx cpu in gaming but the immense overclock makes up for the lack - as you can see in that chart.

And of the 3 chips, E2140, E2160 and E2180, the latter is clocked the highest and supposedly runs the coolest due to a slight change in architecture over its smaller brothers.

The OEM E2180 cost me $83. The X6800 cpu goes for $975 (no, that's not a typo). If I can't get the E2180 up to at least 3.3Ghz with a Zalman CNPS9500, I'll sell it cheap on fleabay and move up to the E43xx series.

As you can see, the E21xxs have a huge bang for your buck - but only if you overclock them. If you run them stock, they're simply budget dual-cores. And, of course, don't expect to overclock them well with the stock heatsink.

 

Given the fact that I've been running a San Diego 4000+ (2.4Ghz stock) at 3.0Ghz for almost a year, and an overclocked Athlon 64 for almost a year before that, I guess I'd have to say why not?

There are several ways to torture a cpu to see if its actually "happy" at a given clock speed. But remember, "speed doesn't kill, voltage does!"

But for many reasons which I won't get into here, I don't build systems for people anymore. At this point, I'd greatly prefer to teach someone the "dark art" rather than selling someone on overclocked rig. Mfrs. state that overclocking a cpu voids its warranty and honestly, I can understand that.