In overclocker circles, the hot topic of the moment is whether or not a quad-core CPU is better than a dual-core. We did many hardware tests to find out. After all, one of the most important questions when you try to put together a powerful new system is which combination of Core 2 processor, motherboard and RAM offers the best value for your money. One of the prerequisites is, naturally, that the system has to offer good overclocking potential in order give you high performance at a low price. That means that you can forget about buying a preconfigured system online or from your local computer around the corner – instead you should have full control over the choice of components. In this article, we present a complete solution consisting of a processor, a cooler, a motherboard and RAM that may become an item on the wish list of many of our readers.
(Full article ‘Overclocking: Dual- vs. Quad-Core CPUs’)

Rarely have things looked as good for Intel as they do right now. Exactly 18 months after the introduction of Intel’s highly successful Core 2 CPUs, the chipmaker is updating them. It is shrinking the structures from 65 nm to 45 nm (Penryn refers to Intel’s new family of 45 nm CPUs, dual and quad core), and is already preparing the next step: the transition to the Nehalem platform. However, that’s all still in the future, and won’t come to pass until the end of 2008 at the earliest. The revision of the Conroe architecture – in order to boost its performance, incorporate new instructions, and, most importantly, reduce power consumption – is right on schedule. Until now, Intel’s Core 2 processors always played second fiddle to AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 processors when it came to power consumption, at least in idle operation.
(Full article ‘Intel’s 45 nm Penryn CPU: 4 GHz Air Cooled’)

Last year we wrote about a low-cost dual core processor that could be overclocked from 2.66 GHz up to an incredible 4.1 GHz. It was the good old 90 nm Smithfield core based Pentium D 805, which delivered an incredible overclocking margin and amazing performance for a moderate $130. While this processor is still available at some places, a new overclocking champion is emerging. Intel’s current low-budget processor, called the Pentium Dual Core, is based on the Core 2 microarchitecture, which means that it is energy efficient and fast, despite its low clock speeds. It offers an even larger overclocking margin of up to 80%, and comes at a price that is almost ridiculously low: how does $89 sound for a boxed processor with cooler?
(Full article ‘$89 Pentium Dual Core that Runs at 3.2 GHz’)