Looking for best bang for buck intel cpu.

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pooptacular

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Currently I have a brisbane x2 3600 at around 2.6ghz. I have a good deal on an ip35-e so I'm jumping ship. What's the best cheapest chip that can atleast match my current cpu with overclocking? Not looking to spend alot, thanks.

edit: the intel cpu will be under a tuniq tower, so highly overclockable stuff is preffered. thanks.
 
E8400 if you want pure clockspeed (4.0 for $200), E2180 if you want cheapest with good overclocking headroom (3.0+ for $70)
 
most bang for the buck cpu: Pentium Dual-Core E2160

Has 9x multi, should be able to oc to 3GHz/3.2GHz (400x8 or 333x9).

EDIT: 1MB L2 kinda sucks, but other then that it is a great budget chip. Single and Dual core Celerons with 512k L2 are the only other cheaper option, but I personally wouldn't go lower then the E2160.
 
I was looking to spend 100$ max but the e7200 is looking good.

edit: nevermind, that e2180 from microcenter is too good a deal to pass up.
 
The 2180 hits $49.99 a lot, and at that price nothing beats it for pure price/performance. Period.
 
The only reason why people depise of the 2180 series is because of the small cache size, but I honestly didnt see a big real time difference between an e6300 and e6600 OCed to the same speed....
 
Him recommending the E7200 has no basis whatsoever when basing it on price/performance, nor does recommending most any other CPU. At $49.99 the E2180 is basically untouchable in that category. The smaller amount of cache having virtually zero impact, once again, while in the price/performance category.

I should probably start another thread but what the hell, this is as good of a place as any. Here's the latest from Tom's Hardware, once again proving what we all knew to be true already. According to their tests anything above 3.0Ghz has minimal impact on improving graphics card performance as any computer veteran was already well aware of, but I guess some people just like to see charts and facts.

Most of us would like to see the magical 4.0Ghz on our screen and be competitive when running SuperPi, but unless you run a specific application that has major benefits you will be throwing you money away on these higher Ghz chips, basically any 45nm chip for that matter, unless of course you are building a completely new system. Anyways here's the linkage to Tom's article.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-gpu-upgrade,1928.html
 
I kind of did a bit of a comparison between my e6420 system (vista64) and another e2200 system (xp32) I built for family use. Both were OC'd to 3.2 ghz and the e6420 has 4gb of ram vs 2gb for the e2200 (both ddr2 800). I've been doing alot of dvd --> h.264 conversion and comparing the two, the e2200 was about 3 - 4 fps slower max. I think for most uses, you won't really feel a big difference ... (though I feel like there's a tiny delay response-wise w/ the e2200 system).

My Q6700 is coming in today ... now that should make a difference.
 
The best bang for buck CPU is this:
http://www.pchub.com/uph/laptop/85-21512-2657/CPU_Intel_SL4TF_Celeron_800MHz.html

But seriously, you guys need to look at it from another perspective. You are spending say $1000 on a computer. Most of of your daily operations depend on CPU performance, so you might as well want to buy a good CPU.

The guy saying that >3GHz makes no noticeable improvement in gaming is right. That's why I personally recommend a Q6600, which overclocks up to 3.6GHz. Most CPU-intensive applications are multi-core optimized and will utilize the four cores. Games and applications not optimized for multi-core will also find 3.6GHz more than sufficient.

I personally wouldnt buy anything other than E2180, E7200, Q6600 and E5410 for "skulltrail" systems.
 
I almost built this recent system with a E21x0 chip and went with a $175 Q6600 instead. After using it for a while and seeing how much flexibility and overhead I got from the Q6600, I would reccomend one unless you are really budget constrained. Its only ~$50 more than a E7200.

Get the cheap E21x0 or skip right up to the Q6600 based on your budget. Those are the best deals for overall system performance/price. I went from a X2 3800 to the Q6600, the difference was huge.
 
The E2160 probably does have the best price/performance ratio, especially when overclocked. However, that does not mean you won't see a worthwhile upgrade by spending a bit more for a higher end CPU. More cache can many times be very benifical. For example, just about all source engine based games see a nice improvemnt from a larger cache.
 
Abu Som3a said:
But seriously, you guys need to look at it from another perspective. You are spending say $1000 on a computer. Most of of your daily operations depend on CPU performance, so you might as well want to buy a good CPU.
Click to expand...

But the thing is, the E2180 IS a good CPU, and despite owning and loving mine I fully admit that my quad core is overkill. Really, there's no "wrong" decision here, just a matter of how much you want to spend.
 
1MB L2 was enough for me IMO, since coming from AMD which has little L2 anyways, I was fine with 1MB. Honestly, I don't know if there's much of a difference between 1MB and 2MB L2 cache.
 
pooptacular said:
Currently I have a brisbane x2 3600 at around 2.6ghz. I have a good deal on an ip35-e so I'm jumping ship. What's the best cheapest chip that can atleast match my current cpu with overclocking? Not looking to spend alot, thanks.
Click to expand...

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/dualcore-shootout_10.html
"Athlon 64 X2 should work at about 20% higher frequency in order to catch up with Core 2 Duo E4000 or Pentium E2000 performance."

If you look through the review, you'll see that Athlon 5000+ (which matches your current CPU) is about equal to a stock clocked E2200 in gaming and falls significantly behind in every other benchmark. So you can buy an E2200 and match your current CPU without overclocking. Of course that would be criminal as you can easily get a 50%+ overclock on it. E2140-2220 all seem to overclock about the same. E2180 and up are guaranteed M0 stepping which is what you want. So get the cheapest E2180 you can find ($60 at Microcenter as pointed out) and go to town.
 
I have placed the order for the e2180 from microcenter. Seeing as how I'm in nyc hopefully I get it tomorrow. I will keep you guys updated on how far I can overclock it.
 
Just got her in and sitting pretty at 3.2ghz so far. First time using an intel system since my pentium2, anyone have a good bios guide? I have an abit ip35-e, thanks alot for the suggestions everyone.
 
The Pentium Dual Core series Overclock really well. I myself have a E2200 that works at 2.2 overcloked to 2,983Mhz on my Asrock Dual-VSTA.
e2200.jpg
 
i personally do not have plans to spend ANY money on cpu, board, or memory until Nahelem comes out. my next upgrade will me around August (My birthday) and it will be a new Vid card.
 
thanks for the link baleedit! will read later on :). i agree, e2180 seems very decent :)
 
weird thing happend last night. Was testing out the overclock at 3.2ghz with orthos and when I woke up it was still going, but at 2ghz??? I'm not sure what type of throttling happened but I thought I had disabled that c1e thing and whatever the other one was. What else could it have been?
 
e7200 is what I'll say, overclocks pretty well and has a 9.5X multiplier, 3MB cache
2.53ghz stock 45nm for only $135
 
pooptacular said:
weird thing happend last night. Was testing out the overclock at 3.2ghz with orthos and when I woke up it was still going, but at 2ghz??? I'm not sure what type of throttling happened but I thought I had disabled that c1e thing and whatever the other one was. What else could it have been?
Click to expand...

Do you have a Gigabyte motherboard? Did you reboot? Did you check the speed with CPUID?
 
I have an abit mobo, I checked the speed of the cpu by running sandra and it completed the mips test at around 16k mips which is what it gets at 2ghz.
 
Are you running Vista? I've had instances where after a crash, vista would reload the applications I had opened.
 
pooptacular said:
Currently I have a brisbane x2 3600 at around 2.6ghz. I have a good deal on an ip35-e so I'm jumping ship. What's the best cheapest chip that can atleast match my current cpu with overclocking? Not looking to spend alot, thanks.

edit: the intel cpu will be under a tuniq tower, so highly overclockable stuff is preffered. thanks.
Click to expand...

did you really think you'd get a single answer? if there was a best bang for the buck cpu there wouldnt be 30 different models...
 
I didnt think I would get a single answer obviously, I wanted different choices and thats what I got. Anyways my 2ghz problem must have been user error, I've been running orthos for 2 days now and all is still well with 3.2ghz so thanks alot everyone.
 
baleedit said:
Him recommending the E7200 has no basis whatsoever when basing it on price/performance, nor does recommending most any other CPU. At $49.99 the E2180 is basically untouchable in that category. The smaller amount of cache having virtually zero impact, once again, while in the price/performance category.

I should probably start another thread but what the hell, this is as good of a place as any. Here's the latest from Tom's Hardware, once again proving what we all knew to be true already. According to their tests anything above 3.0Ghz has minimal impact on improving graphics card performance as any computer veteran was already well aware of, but I guess some people just like to see charts and facts.

Most of us would like to see the magical 4.0Ghz on our screen and be competitive when running SuperPi, but unless you run a specific application that has major benefits you will be throwing you money away on these higher Ghz chips, basically any 45nm chip for that matter, unless of course you are building a completely new system. Anyways here's the linkage to Tom's article.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-gpu-upgrade,1928.html
Click to expand...

I just bought an E7200 and I'm quite pleased with it, coming from having a Pentium D 925. I really did not buy it for performance reasons, but for lower running temps. The 925 ran hot all the time.
 
pooptacular said:
I didnt think I would get a single answer obviously, I wanted different choices and thats what I got. Anyways my 2ghz problem must have been user error, I've been running orthos for 2 days now and all is still well with 3.2ghz so thanks alot everyone.
Click to expand...

3.2Ghz for $60? That's a heckuva deal. Sounds like you made the right choice.

I went with the e7200 for my new build (should be here Friday), but that was only because I'm a tech-geek and I needed the 45nm to feed my ego. If I had stayed closer to my budget, I probably would have gone with the same chip. That's a really good deal, and probably the best budget chip I've seen. Anyone who has a tight budget should look at that, right there.
 
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