Core 2 goes cheap, with L2 cache slashed to 1M and Pentium branding at low end.
They’re in stock at many places now. I don’t understand why ebuyer are selling the E2140 at a higher cost than the E2160. 
So… ordered an E2160, with the google checkout offer still on the price is even better 
Excluding postage, the E2160 seems to be around £10 less than it’s bigger cache brother E4300 at same clock.
I don’t have an insane fsb mobo to push it though, only an old asrock. But I hope the power consumption of this will be very low and it’ll do nicely in my server box.
Not many reviews or benchmarks around. I think this is due to the official release being early June, so the usual places may still be bound by NDA. The few benches around suggest the reduced cache doesn’t hurt much compared to the E4300.
wow thats some bargain dual core loving there :eek:
Yes the formatting is screwed below but I’m too lazy to fix it XD
Had some trouble running it initially, it would error out in superpi or prime95. Eventually found it was the memory voltage needing a bit of a boost.
Basic summary, for superpi and cinebench rendering, the E2160 running single core is about 30% to 2x the speed of the celeron. I don’t have the results from prime95 processed at all, but it was around 30% faster in that.
Power consumption is lower, but it looks like I got other things in the system to kill to really get the power usage down low.
Celeron 326 Pentium E2160
Cinebench 9.5
Rendering (single) 197 299
Rendering (multiple) 553
Multiprocessor speedup 1.85
SuperPI 1M
DDR333 67.188 35.656
DDR400 33.813
Power consumption
Desktop idle 87 84
1 CPU loaded 129 92
2 CPU loaded 98
Finally got round to playing with the 2160 today. The mobo I used isn’t a good start for overclocking… but it was (and still is) cheap esp if you have old DDR/AGP bits lying around.
System:
E2160
Asrock 775i65G
2x256 Corsair XMS3200LL (BH5)
FX5200 AGP 128MB
Enermax 430W PSU
In the past I never had much luck getting decent overclocks with this mobo due to the limited fsb control and voltage options. But this CPU seems a better match than the others. The only tweak needed for stability in the bios was to set the mem voltage from auto to high to keep the BH5 fed properly.
The maximum fsb setting in the bios was 300 MHz which was hit easily, if the memory was kept at spec.
Did 20 mins+ of prime95 on each core at 2.7 GHz (300*9). To go past 300, had to use clockgen. Leaving prime95 running in the background I increased it to 2.75 GHz which seemed ok for the short time I left it there. 2.8 GHz broke prime95 stability but still running on desktop. Decreasing ram timings didn’t help, I think I might have reached the limit of the CPU at stock voltage, on this mobo at least.
Cooling was an intel copper core hsf (recycled from E6600 box) temps under load topped out around 45C at a room temp of 20C.