While browsing an e-tailer a few weeks ago, I stumbled on Intel's Pentium E5200, a dual-core offering that I had forgotten all about. It was launched this past August to virtually no fanfare, and thanks to a few things that were going on at the time (IDF, NVISION), I never thought about it since. I did want to get one in though, because although it carries a few caveats, it's still a Wolfdale chip, and at under $100, I figured it might very-well be a steal.
Intel currently offers two Pentium models based on the 45nm process, the E5300 and E5200. The differences between them are a mere $2 (per 1,000) and 100MHz. We chose to bring the E5200 in for the simple fact that it's the least expensive model out there from Intel, at least of which uses their latest technologies, such as 45nm.
The Pentium Dual-Core chips do have two primary drawbacks, though, which include 2MB of L2 Cache and absolutely no part of Intel's SSE4.x instruction set. What that means is that more expensive chips (even the E7200), will have the ability to recode video that utilizes these instructions much, much faster. For those who don't encode video all-too-often, the loss won't be noticed.
Another drawback could be the low Front-Side Bus speed of 800MHz. That equates to a raw value of 200MHz, which means the maximum memory speed supported at stock is DDR3-800. Considering that no memory manufacturer produces kits with only that speed supported, it goes to show just how lacking that is. As we'll see later, overclocking is a super-quick fix to this issue.
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