Customer Reviews

Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 Dual-Core Processor, 1.8 GHz, 2M L2 Cache, LGA775

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Don't know how Intel found the magic recipe, but this processor is great. Its running in a Gig P965-ds3 board, which is a great overclocking board. I have it at a FSB of 333 MHz, bought come Corsair PC-5400 memory, and the stock cooler. This runs the system at 3 GB, just amazing. Its cool, great benchmarks, totally stable. Buy it, you won't regret it.

This processor is still in use even though I bought it several years ago. Still overclocked at 3.2 ghz. running on my home server. It's a beast.

I remember I bought this chip 4 years ago when I built my first computer! Wow time flies. I'm way more advanced now than I ever have been. I still have this in the computer I'm using now. It's been an amazing processor!

The E4300 Dual Core from Intel has been around for over a year now. When it was first released, it was hailed by enthusiasts as the "perfect storm" of a CPU because by design or chance, the unit was eminently overclockable and vastly cheaper than its contemporaries. I confess that I am not an enthusiast but my husband is. He designed a new system around this chip, which is still selling for the same price it was more than a year ago. That should be some indication of its staying power.

As I understand it, most computer chips - CPUs, memory, etc. - are rated to run at a certain speed. When you buy a computer from a manufacturer such as Dell, that manufacturer usually provides no method of changing those speeds. But when you build your own computer, you can select all the parts yourself and pick the ones that can be run at higher speeds. So this CPU, which is rated at 1.8 GHz, can actually be run at 3.0 GHz and faster. When it was introduced, it sold for around $150. But if you were to buy an Intel CPU that was rated to run at 3.0GHz, you'd have paid a retail price of over $1000.

The trick is match the components so that they all work together at the higher speeds and nothing overheats. My husband spent quite a bit of time researching every scrap of info he could and eventually did build a great system he was happy with. He's still happy with it more than a year later, mainly because of this CPU, which he has been running at 3.0GHz all that time, with XP, then later with Vista.

But time marches on and for just a few dollars more, you can now get an Intel Quad-Core CPU. That's 4 CPUs on one chip. I can't wait to see what they come up with next year!

I think Intel should warn Windows XP users that even with new drivers, the dual-core is lost. If they're lucky (without overclocking a lot) Windows XP will read the processor as a single 1.9Ghz.