Originally posted by: Denithor
I would pick up either the e2160 or e2180 (higher multi is worth the extra $5-10) and push it to ~3GHz.
Read over this
article for a comparison of an e2160 @ 3.2GHz to an e6750 and an e6850. In short, the OC e2160 generally performed at the level of the e6750 and in a few cases actually beat the e6850 (including some of the media encoding tests).
@Denithor - I'm hoping he reads the article, just as you said. And I hope he comes away with a different conclusion than your misleading summary. Point of fact, I usually see pretty fine articles at Tom's - this one, however, baffles me. They take E2160, overclock it to it's stability limit - pumping it with a 1.5 vcore - and it manages to hang in there, as you said, against STOCK CPU speeds on the E6750 and E6850. And for 90 bucks, that's a great result, no question. The E6750 is 190 bucks. OP saves 100 bucks. Sweet. But I get the sense, from the OP's comments himself, that there is a certain reluctance to push his new rig to its extreme limits. But let's suppose he's good with that...he's not gonna do 3.2 on stock heatsinks. So punch in 40-50 bucks for the heatsink. Then he gonna have to keep an eye on case temps and get all that heat out - 'cause I see a jump of about 50watts between stock and overclock. So now he's got to keep an eye out for maybe a more extreme case, with perhaps more powerful fans. And in the end, pushing his CPU to an 80% overclock - it's extreme limits - and having spent his 100 buck savings on hardware to even make the O/C possible, he gets to bench at levels he could do stock with the E6750. I have a couple of rigs running the 6750. The one the family uses is running at stock voltages @ 3.2GHz, with a stock heatsink, with two slow turning 120mm fans, in an antec case, and you can't hear it. Which system is gonna bench better? The E2160 @ 3.2GHz, at over 1.5v and an 80% O/C...? or the E6750, loping along at 3.2GHz, cool and quiet? That's rhetorical, that question.
Hey, I like to O/C - my rig in my sig, I play with it all the time and I enjoy the tweak, like a lot of us. I just hate to see folks asking questions and then getting snap answers. Lest anyone think I'm an E6750 fan-boy, I'm not. Serves my purposes just fine, while I wait to see what penryn has in store down the line. The salient point that I took away from the Tom's article is not that the E2160 is the "be-all"...instead, I read the last paragraph:
"The 80% overclocking margin on a low-budget processor leaves no doubt about the level of control Intel has over its 65 nm manufacturing process. The Pentium Dual Core reaches 3.2 GHz, and many Core 2 Duo E6x50 CPUs have been reported to break the 4 GHz barrier with appropriate hardware components, which also represents a 30-50% overclocking margin. We're curious as to how overclockable the 45 nm Penryn generation will be!"
...and hear what a lot of us already know - that the Core 2 Duo is simply a terrific product, the E2160 included.
@popnfresh - your quote - "You can get 3ghz with a 21xx model with the stock heatsink. The cache difference will only be apparent on video/audio/photo editing or encoding. Folding as well. Just gaming, you're going to get the most for your money with the 21xx line."
You know this from personal experience? I looked up your rigs - you're running AMD...
Regards,
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