C2D E7200, the new Celeron 300A!

[Sharktooth]

Some of you will remember for sure the good old Celeron 300A and some for sure wont.
The 300A was the most overclockable CPU intel produced in the "Cartridge" age. Stock clock was 300MHz as the name says, but it was easily overclockable to 450MHz with a small modification. Badass overclockers reached 500+ MHz or even more with one of the cheapest CPUs you could buy when the fastest CPU from intel was the Pentium 2 @ 450MHz...
Well, today i had a E7200 (2.53GHz) in my hands and since i read on websites it was easily overclockable, i tried it by myself and... holy crap! we have a 300A successor!
i tried the usual overclocking stuff and sadly at the first attempt i didnt manage to reach 4GHz (with stock heatsink!!!) but i was sooooo close. It was running stable at 3.8...
I decided to try a more efficient aircooling, more overvolt and... bang!!!
FSB @ 422*9.5 = 4009MHz !!! I will test stability another time... but linux boots with no problems!
It could be the asus motherboard or just some luck... but 4Ghz on air is mindblowing.
So if you're looking for a mid-low budget CPU you know what to buy! ensure you get a good MB and at least some decent 1600MHz DDR3 RAM modules...

P.S.: Well, even if im not an intel fan, i must admit those 45nm core2 cpus are really outstanding.

[Inventive Software]

Lucky b****rd! ;)

[Blue_MiSfit]

whyyyyyyyyyy would you spend so much money on DDR3 RAM??

That obscenely offsets the cost of buying a cheap CPU!

Can't other C2D's hit 4 GHz on air with no problem, but with higher multipliers - thus requiring less FSB and consequentially RAM speed?

~MiSfit

[IgorC]

Hehe, E7200 costs 133$. A little bit high to be called as celeron.

E3140 for 74$ will be other 45 nm cpu and will substitute old series E2xxx.http://www.nordichardware.com/news,7576.html

E2160-E2220 were 65 nm overclocker's stars. Just for <100$ you have performance of top dual cores >1000$.

[Sharktooth]

you cant get that high with those CPUs. it would need a stellar FSB freq.

@Blue_MiSfit: other c2d can do that but will cost more.
DDR3 are becoming cheaper every day...

[IgorC]

E2160 at 3.4 Ghz was faster than ex-TOP Core 2 Extreme X6800. http://www.overclockers.ru/lab/25806.shtml

The same way overclocked E3xxx could be on par with current TOP cpus.

[burfadel]

I still think a mid range cpu overclocked still presents the best all round solution, especially where cooling may be a problem! - adding water cooling or other expensive cooling methods completely defeats the purpose of overclocking a low end CPU. It would be interesting to see the life expectancy of a low end CPU overclocked to the extent of the above E2160 when run at full cpu for many weeks.

[Shinigami-Sama]

I still think a mid range cpu overclocked still presents the best all round solution, especially where cooling may be a problem! - adding water cooling or other expensive cooling methods completely defeats the purpose of overclocking a low end CPU. It would be interesting to see the life expectancy of a low end CPU overclocked to the extent of the above E2160 when run at full cpu for many weeks.

depends
the water cooler is a one time investment
just add and replace tubes as needed
save on the CPU
and when upgrade times comes you can get that nice big CPU and over clock the shit of them too

[Sharktooth]

E2160 at 3.4 Ghz was faster than ex-TOP Core 2 Extreme X6800. http://www.overclockers.ru/lab/25806.shtml

The same way overclocked E3xxx could be on par with current TOP cpus.
3.4GHz is not 4GHz though...
Im also convinced that beast can reach even higher clock freqs with a proper watercooling.

[JoeShrubbery]

You know there were people getting 3.5Ghz with the E6300 way back when (from a 1.86Ghz stock speed), provided they had a motherboard that could actually run the FSB high enough (500 with that locked-in 7x multiplier, at a time when most boards couldn't come close to running that).

So yeah, pretty much the entire Core2Duo line, right from day one back almost two years ago, has just had ENORMOUS overclocking potential.

[JohnnyMalaria]

Hehe, E7200 costs 133$. A little bit high to be called as celeron.

Have you any idea how obscenely cheap that is? (I can't tell if you are being tongue-in-cheek or not :confused:)

I had (and still have) a 300A that was overclocked and and decided to see how it really compared to the equivalent P2. Well, the o/c 300A was about 2% faster but still much more than $133 - and that's at late 1990's exchange rates ;)

There must be a lot of young, spoilt folk here! (Or I'm just old and jealous.)

[Sharktooth]

You know there were people getting 3.5Ghz with the E6300 way back when (from a 1.86Ghz stock speed), provided they had a motherboard that could actually run the FSB high enough (500 with that locked-in 7x multiplier, at a time when most boards couldn't come close to running that).

So yeah, pretty much the entire Core2Duo line, right from day one back almost two years ago, has just had ENORMOUS overclocking potential.
as i said 3.4/3.5GHz is not 4GHz.
4GHz is enough to reach or even surpass some stock clocked quad cores...
However, i agree on the c2d line overclocking potential.
It just seems Intel kept the stock clock frequencies low to keep temps and energy requirement low as well.

[saint-francis]

The problem with overclocking these 45 nm CPU's to the moon is that they degrade pretty quickly if you give them too much voltage. Not like the 65 nm CPU's which take voltage better; like older processors did. There are a lot of overclocking enthusiasts who did serious damage to their new 45 nm toys before the community realized how sensitive the processors are to voltage.

[Sharktooth]

i got it working at 4GHz with aq voltage of 1.5V...

[Inventive Software]

Remember the P4s that required at least 2V piped directly to them? :p

[Shinigami-Sama]

The problem with overclocking these 45 nm CPU's to the moon is that they degrade pretty quickly if you give them too much voltage. Not like the 65 nm CPU's which take voltage better; like older processors did. There are a lot of overclocking enthusiasts who did serious damage to their new 45 nm toys before the community realized how sensitive the processors are to voltage.

lol
sudden northwood death syndrom even
though that was 130nm dieing from 1.7v+

[ronnylov]

1.4 Volt is considered max on these 45 nm CPUs if you want them to live more than a year. Xbitlabs did a review on the E7200 and it hit 3,9 GHz at 1,4 Volt set in bios and 4.0 GHz @ 1.5 V:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core2duo-e7200.html

Even if it's cheap I think the extra 100 MHz is not worth 0.1 Volt higher voltage. I would stop at 3,8 GHz and feed it a lower voltage. A better heatsink than the stock cooler is still a nice idea because you can use a slower fan and reduce the noise from the PC. Lower temperatures also increase the life of the CPU.

Video encoding does not seem too much affected of the smaller cache memory but games was 10% slower than a similar clocked E8xxx CPU in the review.

[anti]

All of this better mean it will run extremely nice and stable @ stock.