Excellent article, great benchmarks and just the right comparisons. (bad English, but I've come to live with it...)

I feel a little let down. I was looking forward to this particular article in hope it'll bring a comparative measurement of power consumption (idle, load) between Intel E2, 4, 6 series and AMD. Granted, most dual-cores are 65 TDP these days, but truth is that there are variations. Unfortunately you missed it this time. Now where am I going to get this data before Conroe becomes obselete altogether? To me, and many others -- although we're kind of a hopeless minority -- this detail is no less important than OC ability. Please take note of this for the next time, as you can really stand out of the crowd in this regard.

I'd like to see a comparison between the OC'd E2160 and the OC'd E4300. I tried looking up the OC E4300 benchmarks but the testbeds are different (mainly due to the use of Vista on the E2160 benchmarks.)

New hope for budget PC, but how can we reach 3.4?

"To check this out we compared the performance of Pentium E2160 processor working at 1.8GHz frequency and featuring 1MB L2 cache against that of a Core 2 Duo E4300 processor with 1.8GHz frequency and 2MB L2 cache and against that of a hypothetical Core 2 Duo processors running at 1.8GHz and featuring 4MB L2 cache"

This is imho bad decison becouse people OC their CPUs and then cache is more important becouse you can't OC RAM as much as CPU so CPU becomes more dependant on cache size.

Love your reviews, as always. One missing but should be interesting info, the cpu cooler used.

"They have pushed the performance of budget solutions to a totally new level"
should have been:
"They have pushed the performance of INTEL budget solutions to a totally new level"

No offence, but whilke these pieces are cute for OC at stock they are on par with AMD pieces in the same price bracket so what "new level" ???

Compared to NetBurst, for sure. But that architecture belongs to history since its 90nm incarnation...

A fabulous article!

Thanks to this overclocking test I'm decided to buy the E2160 in autumn. Hope I will touch minimally 3GHz, if I get 3.4 as you, I will be the most happy person in the world.

Once again, thanks a lot. Great job.

very informative indeed and currently the best review to date on the new line or Pentium processors.

but here are some quite weird, confusing, and contradicting statements. you keep on saying that the E2160 and E2140 are "identical" to the Allendale Core L2 stepping.

why not simply say that the E2160 and E2140 are "on" the Allendale Core? are you not sure? being "identical" could mean (1) they look exactly alike but not the same or (2) they are exactly the same.

see Exhibit 1: http://i92.photobucket.com/albums/l29/presler_extreme/exhibi t1.jpg

the table above says it's on Conroe-1M (1MB L2 cache total). you started to use the word "identical".

let us now see Exhibit 2: http://i92.photobucket.com/albums/l29/presler_extreme/exhibi t2.jpg

CPU-Z version 1.40 reports "Conroe" and not Allendale. Version 1.40 as per revisions history can "correctly" recognize the Pentium E2160 and E2140 processors. but who knows, the next version of CPU-Z would tell otherwise, so let us wait.

here now comes Exhibit 3: http://i92.photobucket.com/albums/l29/presler_extreme/exhibi t3-1.jpg

so "identical" to Allendale with half the L2 cache.

same with Exhibit 4: http://i92.photobucket.com/albums/l29/presler_extreme/exhibi t4.jpg

maybe at this early stage you are not yet fully sure if is indeed Conroe or Allendale. i just hope Intel could clear-up things this coming June 3, the official launch. i'm sure more reviews will come.

cheers and congratulations. i hope you could help clear things up too. more power! thanks.

--
Presler

Celeron i back!

If these are already shipping from Intel as the article indicates, when do we expect to start seeing E2160s and E2140s available for retail purchase?

Overall a great article. It's good to see the differences between L2 Cache sizes.
One thing that was missing IMHO is a power consumption comparison, these are budget CPUs after all and an increase in power consumption lowers the price/performance advantage.
I just have one question, how much would a 1MB L2 CPU gain from an increase in RAM speed vs a CPU with 4MB L2? Just a though.

Excellent article; very nice analysis...

got this from a reliable source. the Pentium E2140/E2160 on Conroe core is actually Allendale. more info here: http://ocxt.multiply.com/journal/item/26

cheers! 8)

these days buying a processor in a box is really expensive!!!!!!!!!!

Very nice, great job.
thx for your information.

I've read better, try again.

ipod skin
http://www.xmasdownload.net

:]

From my point of view, the test that has been done is not fair enough. Inter C2D E4300 is not comparable to AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+, it is suitable to compete with AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+. AMD has a lot of processor ranging from X2 3600+ until 6000+ compared to Intel. So, the processor should be compared within the same price range. AMD is much better than Intel for middle range processor right now before AMD captures again the KING title for the high-end level.

I think the article is good overall but there are some aspects not quite right when testing such products. And when I say that I'm pointing that the platforms used are much more expensive that a budget computer would normally use. I mean would you buy a cheap 80$ CPU combined with such an expensive kit of memory and that kind of motherboard ? I think not, but this is just my opinion.