Simple, fast, durable, overclockable
Pros: Cheap, easy to overclock
Cons: Heats up fast, unstable at high frequencies.
The Intel Core 2 Duo E7200, it's rather old by now, but it's still a good processor.
It obviously doesn't boast "extreme" performance, but Intel's budget Dual-Cores are still worth the while.
The E7200 has a 65W TDP, 3MBs of L2 Cache and boasts 2.53 GHz.
This is not very impressive, nor fast, but hang on a minute. Let's go to overclocking.
Without raising the volts, it was possible to get my E7200 to an impressive 3.24 GHz
http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=1934092
Raising the volts a little bit (to 1.3V), I managed to increase the frequency to 3.4GHz.
(Unfortunately, I don't have proof of this one anymore, as it was lost on my old desktop)
Anything higher than 3.4 would be very unstable on stock volts.
I tried to put 1.4V through it, and couldn't get it over 3.6GHz.
I mean, it could boot on frequencies as high as 3.7GHz, but it would quickly become unstable.
3.6GHz is still very nice for a processor that had a stock frequency of 2.53. It's a 1GHz increase! This made it faster than the more expensive E8400!
Overall, this is a very good processor. I might have had one of those... "less-than-perfect" chips, which would have explained why it was so unstable. You might be able to push it further than what I did.
It obviously doesn't boast "extreme" performance, but Intel's budget Dual-Cores are still worth the while.
The E7200 has a 65W TDP, 3MBs of L2 Cache and boasts 2.53 GHz.
This is not very impressive, nor fast, but hang on a minute. Let's go to overclocking.
Without raising the volts, it was possible to get my E7200 to an impressive 3.24 GHz
http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=1934092
Raising the volts a little bit (to 1.3V), I managed to increase the frequency to 3.4GHz.
(Unfortunately, I don't have proof of this one anymore, as it was lost on my old desktop)
Anything higher than 3.4 would be very unstable on stock volts.
I tried to put 1.4V through it, and couldn't get it over 3.6GHz.
I mean, it could boot on frequencies as high as 3.7GHz, but it would quickly become unstable.
3.6GHz is still very nice for a processor that had a stock frequency of 2.53. It's a 1GHz increase! This made it faster than the more expensive E8400!
Overall, this is a very good processor. I might have had one of those... "less-than-perfect" chips, which would have explained why it was so unstable. You might be able to push it further than what I did.
