Product Reviews

The arrival of a new Pentium processor may not sound very exciting, but don't be put off by the name. Intel's Pentium Dual Core E2140 uses the company's Core technology, rather than being a throw-back to the previous generation of processors.

The reason for the old name is that this processor has a slower frontside bus (FSB) and less level 2 cache than Core 2 Duo processors. The 800MHz FSB (quad-pumped from a clock speed of 200MHz), compared with the 1,066MHz or 1,333MHz FSB speeds of the Core 2 Duos, means that the E2140 has less bandwidth to talk to system components and memory.

The E2140 has just 1MB of L2 cache, while the full Core 2 processors have 4MB, so it can cache less information from main memory, slowing down the overall performance. Even so, the 1MB of cache is intelligently shared between the processor's two cores: if only one core is busy, it gets the full cache, and if both cores need access to the same bit of data, it needs to be loaded into the cache only once. The processor uses Intel's SmartCache technology, which predicts what data needs to be loaded from memory and requests it before it's needed. It's a clever

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technique for reducing system bottlenecks and making sure the processor is constantly supplied with data for processing.

The E2140 runs at a clock speed of 1.6GHz (a multiplier of eight on the 200MHz FSB). At this speed it's a decent performer and did well in our video-encoding test with a score of 176. Performance in our more memory-intensive image-editing test was respectable, but far below that of Core 2 Duo processors, with a score of 125.

What makes this processor so astounding, though, is how far it can be overclocked. You'll need a decent motherboard if you want to push it as far as it will go - we used Asus's Blitz Formula - as some of the motherboards we tried while testing this processor wouldn't pass the power on self-test (POST) after we overclocked it. We first overclocked the processor's FSB to 266MHz (1,066MHz quad-pumped), which is the same as the original Core 2 Duos. At this speed the Pentium Dual Core E2140 turned in an overall score of 165 in our 2D benchmarks, making it faster than the Core 2 Duo E6320, which costs twice as much.

Even better, we overclocked the FSB to 375MHz (1,500MHz quad-pumped), giving the processor a clock speed of 3GHz. It ran perfectly well with a stock Intel cooler, reaching 57C under full load, and achieved a score of 229 in our 2D benchmarks. This is faster than a Core 2 Duo E6750, and incredible for a processor that costs less than £50.

Intel's Pentium Dual Core E2140 is a stunning processor. It provides excellent value as a basic entry-level processor for anyone on a tight budget, but it's also an incredible overclocker. If you want outrageous performance for very little money and you're prepared to up its speed, then this is the processor to buy.