Oh, how far $80 can stretch...

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
A few weeks ago, while strolling through Intel's latest processor pricing list, I stumbled on a mention of the Pentium E5200, a Dual-Core chip at 2.50GHz. This CPU came out a few months ago (I believe ~September), and when it dropped, I ended up forgetting all about it thanks to so many other things going on around the same time. Well, I decided to order one and put it to the test, because if there's one thing I love, it's high-performance from a budget chip.

I posted a news item way back in June about overclockers hitting 4.0GHz on the chip, but as you know, if it's not stable, it doesn't excite me. But, knowing the sheer potential of this chip, I knew it was going to be a ton of fun to tinker with. I've literally been overclocking this CPU off and on for the past week, and I'm able to conclude on a few overclocks here. I'll post the full review next week.

The first goal, of course, was to see how far the chip could be pushed without increasing a single voltage. I should note, though, that for all processor benchmarking, I use 1.30v... it doesn't change. That said, the maximum stable overclock here was 3.32GHz:


It might have been able to go a bit higher, but I wasn't interested in tweaking that much to find out. Because I had the E7200 installed in the system prior to the E5200, the FSB was left at 266MHz, and thanks to the E5200's incredible multiplier of 12.5x, it boot up as 3.32GHz. I was surprised to see it boot without a single issue, but there was none, so I left it at that clock and stressed it further.

The above screenshot shows a 15-hour-long stress of IntelBurnTest, and after that, I followed up with nine loops of 3DMark Vantage's Extreme test set to 2560x1600 and it passed all tests without issue.

Things of course changed when I applied more voltage, but the goal here was to not go too high, because it should be something that could be used for everyday use, even if the knowledge is there that it will lower the life-expectancy of the CPU (overclocking will do this, regardless of how large the increase is). When all said and done, 1.40v CPU gave us a stable 3.75GHz clock:


Once again, this was game stable... I ran the same 3DMark Vantage test over and over, and also took it for a quick spin in real-world gaming and it was just fine. The IntelBurnTest as seen in the screenshot above ran for just over 12 hours. One thing you might have noticed is the somewhat weak memory, though, at DDR3-800 6-6-6. This was for a reason. Somehow, the CPU voltage played a role in this, because after lots of tweaking, I found that increasing the CPU voltage alone would cause greater stability with higher memory clocks.

In another test, I increased the memory to DDR3-1200 (maximum thanks to the 300MHz FSB) and increased the timings to 7-7-7, so it would be close to our usual settings of DDR3-1333 7-7-7. That change required a push of another 0.250v to sit at 1.425v for the CPU. Little high, but not quite dangerous. That small push retained full stability, but increased our memory frequency by 50%, so I thought it was a good trade-off.

As it stands though, this is some incredible value for $80. I find it to be a good value even at stock speeds, but the "free" overclock avails an extra 820MHz, which is pretty incredible. At that point, it's almost par with an E8600! The main downside of the E5200 is the lack of the SSE4 instruction set, but that's moot if you don't need it anyway. I can definitely say though, this chip gave me the most overclocking fun I've had in quite a while.
 

madstork91

The One, The Only...
All things considering, when you can get this kinda performance, outta something for that price...

It may be time for even a few of us penny pinching scrouges to upgrade... finally.
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Very interesting results, and one impressive showing from such a cheap processor! That's some nice overclocking ya got :)

THe E5200 is a Wolfdale chip, it has all the SSE4 instructions, with the exception of the few additional SSE4.2 (~7) that came with Core i7?
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
It may be time for even a few of us penny pinching scrouges to upgrade... finally.

This chip belongs nowhere near you. For what you do, Quad-Core is your only option :)

THe E5200 is a Wolfdale chip, it has all the SSE4 instructions, with the exception of the few additional SSE4.2 (~7) that came with Core i7?

It's Wolfdale, but no Pentium model has SSE4... at least not yet.
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
Oh wow, that's a great catch. It supports SSE3 and SSSE3, but not Penryn's SSE4....
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
Yup, it hurts, but if you don't need it (and a lot of people don't), then it's not such a big deal. For the price, the lack of the inclusion is understandable... I'm just glad that's the extent of the downsides.
 
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