Upcoming Budget Intel E5200 Dual-Core Overclocks to 4.0GHz

Popular overclocker coolaler has gone and acquired himself an Intel E5200 processor, due out sometime this quarter, and pushed the humble chip to its breaking point. The processor itself comes in at 2.5GHz with an 800MHz bus and scales back to 2MB of L2 cache. It uses a 12.5x multiplier and sticks to the 65W thermal envelope. Though pricing and release information has not yet been announced, the chip is rumored to cost around $84 per 1,000 units.

Now, I thought the 4.0GHz+ I hit in our E8400 Core 2 Duo review was impressive, but coolaler took his E5200 all the way up to 4.0GHz on what seems to be air cooling, given the relatively warm temperatures. That is impressive, and might just make this chip a serious option for those who don’t need the extra cache.

What I find most interesting though, is the fact that the CPUID information in the CPU-Z shot labels the chip as a “Pentium(R) Dual-Core CPU”, so that’s likely exactly what it will appear as on the store shelves. In addition to the lower FSB and lesser cache, it appears the chip also lacks the SSE4 instruction set. This won’t matter to people who don’t render multimedia with applications that use it, but it’s a notable loss regardless. Still, 4.0GHz for >$100? Try complaining about that!