http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/0 [...] index.html

Do you want plenty of power for very little money? There is a CPU that can beat a Core 2 Duo E6750 for a fraction of its cost: consider a Pentium Dual Core CPU. It utilizes the Core 2 microarchitecture, but has an overclocking margin of almost 80%!

Nice find, I hadn't even considered a pentium or celeron since that last overclocking guide where they pushed the celeron to 4ghz or whatever it was. Lately all I hear is E6300, E6600, E6750, E7850, Q6600, and some of the lower C2Ds.

What's some "relatively cheap" though decent memory for this type of overclock? Help me with the math here, but at 1:1, DDR2 would only be running at 400mhz at stock speed, and at 710mhz at the fsb1420. That's still not even the rated speed for DDR2800, so why did they mention a "10% memory overclock", and needing to up the memory voltage? Were they running a different memory ratio, and if so, why? I thought running it 1:1 was the way to go.

By the way, I'm thinking about doing something like this in the very near future. Thanks so much for this article as well as the $500 gaming rig article earlier this week.

Should run fine for however long you want to keep it.

Internal confidential Evga docs I have read consider up to 1.625v safe for C2D on their mobos, my quad runs fine at 1.49v and well within that limit.

This is a great article for performance, but what about heat and power savings? I wish you guys would have talked more about the fact that this thing runs over 20 watts higher than the E6750. Also, how hot does this processer run?

I was thinking about trying this overclocking for an HTPC, but it just seems like the heat and power usage would make the E6750 a better solution.

As far as I'm concerned that little bugger ROCKS. I love finding products that.

They did that witch stock cooling... if they have better cooling couldn't they go quite a bit higher?

Ok... I don't want to be overly zealous toward AMD but enough is enough. I'm bordering recommending Toms be removed as a credible source for hardware info. Recent off track recommendations include the $500 PC, now this, the hardware recommendations here are so bios it actually makes me angry.

Let's get one thing clear, Intel C2D is great, but more expensive than the X2. The X2 gives up 400-600Mhz to the full blown C2D. On a stripped down C2D, 300-400Mhz.

This CPU really needs to be placed into the same class as the 4100+ on 65nm Tech. I believe the two CPUs will trade blows when fully over clocked. The Intel will take more wins. Problem is, the AMD "system" will cost you about $50 bucks less. Add to that the Quad core upgrade path and the choice becomes VERY difficult.

Why won't Tom's look at AMD at all! What about an $80 full blown AMD 690 board which has Raid, paired with a $75 cpu that will crank 3.0Gig? Now you save $50 bucks or more of the Intel and in 6 months pick up a quad core for... $100 bucks? Come on Tom's your hardware "advise" has been... well off the mark.

Looks to me like the thing runs fine at stock speeds as well. FPS in games are all well over 60 and that was at stock.

4100+? Ahh ... what?!? No clue. Honestly, if you're buying a board that cheap are you really gonna use the RAID feature. My guess is that you won't have the money to be able to blow on two HDDs if you're pinching pennies like that. 3.0 Ghz, right, with on a good day with an Scythe Infinity submerged in LN2. Pshhh.

Yeah, but it's only a 32bit CPU... something that should be put in bright red flashing colours on the main page of the article.

well sum questions supposed to be answered by Patrick Schmid, Achim Roos the ppl who did the overclocking
i really want to know what was the temp that they operated there cpu at especially that it was on stock cooling
more over the cpu life is reduced by the increase of both factors heat and voltage, so even if you could ceep it cold the life would be reduced, i think up to ~1.4v wont be bad and nearly no noticable decrease. for this cpu at this price if it served for a couple of years at 3.2G+ that would be very nice for its price.

Unless there's something I'm missing, this is a 64-bit CPU. Here's an article from xbit:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/c [...] 160_3.html

It clearly shows the E21x0 series supports Intel 64 bit technology.

Just about the only thing that didn't make sense in their $500 build was the $100 power supply. It was a pretty good article and says what it is supposed to. That you can build a computer that will play games pretty well without having to spend $2000 on them, which is something most sites seem to forget. While extreme systems are nice they aren't practical for most people visiting the site. We've seen all sorts of people asking for recommendations in the $500-600 range on the forums.

This was about a high OCing chip that ran on a fairly basic motherboard and was cheap. They probably don't have an AMD processor listed because they couldn't find one that would also OC 80% for the same price on the stock cooler. This article wasn't about how each and every processor compares, it was about how even a low end processor can OC to high levels. How many other processors are you going to find for $90 that is going to get an 80% OC with a stock cooler. Will that $75 AMD CPU work on a stock cooler at 3.0GHz or are you going to have to spend that $50 you saved on a high end cooler in which case you haven't came out ahead in price or performance.

In terms of future upgrading of the system, this build is also using a motherboard that supports the next generation of Intel CPUs as well along with the current generation of quad cores. The upgrade potential of this system and an AMD system is going to be fairly similar. In fact, unlike the AMD system, we know with 100% certainty the minimum we can expect in the upgrade where as the upgrade potential of the AMD system is still unknown. Its likely to be pretty good for the AMD system, but the Intel system is likely to improve as well, but the certainty of what you will get with AMD is still unclear.


The thing is, even if they put an AMD system into the article as well, if it didn't perform as well as the Intel system they showed then you would still complain that it was unfair and simply done to show the bias against AMD. Their last article, which you were just complaining about, with the low cost system which is where AMD is supposed to be strongest and you still didn't like it. There was no bias there for one system or the other, they showed that at similar costs you could build a system from either company and they would be about equal. It was just about as unbiased as you can get.