Intel Pentium Dual-core E2200 2.20GHz Processor

Bargain Performer

Strengths: Price per performance

Weakness: On-die cache size

I was going to get a Conroe 430, but for a little more in price I picked this up. I was very surprised to see it match my Athlon64 3800 X2, a CPU I use for gaming and video encoding with great satisfaction. I dropped this CPU in a Shuttle K45 and it works great. The power consumption and temperatures are good. I must say the on-die cache is relatively low, but it is all you need unless you are...
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I was going to get a Conroe 430, but for a little more in price I picked this up. I was very surprised to see it match my Athlon64 3800 X2, a CPU I use for gaming and video encoding with great satisfaction. I dropped this CPU in a Shuttle K45 and it works great.

The power consumption and temperatures are good. I must say the on-die cache is relatively low, but it is all you need unless you are running some very demanding games or software. Several benchmarks show this to be extremely capable for most games. I personally use this for an always-on BitTorrent client and LAMP web server.

For the price you can't go wrong. My last full PC build ran a $1600 budget. I doubt I will ever spend that much again, as prices have come down so much on hardware across the board. It is once again a great idea to spend less than $100 on a CPU.

By FourScience - Sep 29, 2008