Intel Pentium E2140 review - Core 2 for £50

Posted at: 12:00am 4th July 2007 by Clive Webster

Price £51.22 inc VAT
Supplier Scan
Manufacturer Intel
SKU number BX80557E2140

The Pentium is back, after a short interval when most people (including ourselves) thought that NetBurst architecture Pentium 4s and Pentium Ds had killed the brand. Clearly, Intel wasn't prepared to drop a brand in which it had been investing since 22 March, 1993. However, while Intel used to give its flagship high-end processors the Pentium treatment, the branding is being used on budget processors that would previously have been called Celerons. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

In typical fashion, our questions as to why the brand has resurfaced went unanswered by Intel. Clearly, even the formidable Intel PR machine can't cope with the amount of products it's pushing out the door these days. In fact, we wouldn't have heard of the Pentium E2140 if we hadn't been browsing the LGA775 CPU section on Scan's website. This brings us to our next point: at the time, Scan was advertising the product as a £51 Core 2 Duo E2140. However, after searching the Intel website, we found the processor was called a Pentium E2140.

So why the confusion on Scan's part? The reason for this can be easily found on Intel's website. The Pentium E2140 is 'based on a new energy-efficient microarchitecture' and has Wide Dynamic Execution (a four-instruction-wide pipeline), 'very deep out-of-order execution', a digital thermal sensor, Advanced Smart Cache and Advanced Digital Media Boost (128-bit SSE instructions). In other words, it's based on the Core architecture, not the NetBurst architecture on which Pentium 4 and Pentium D chips were based.

Granted, it's a crippled Core 2 Duo, since the shared Level 2 cache is 1MB rather than the 2MB or 4MB of Core 2 Duos. The Pentium E2140 also has a 200MHz FSB (800MHz effective), compared with the 266MHz FSB (1,066MHz effective) or 333MHz FSB (1,333MHz effective) of fully-fledged chips. Each of its two cores runs at just 1.6GHz, 200MHz slower than a Core 2 Duo E4300.

As that's less than half the frequency of previous-generation Pentiums - the Pentium 4 series was clocked up to 3.8GHz and the Pentium D series up to 3.6GHz - we wanted to find out whether the highly efficient Core architecture of the Pentium E2140 could compensate for its low frequency. The last Pentium-branded CPU worth considering was the 2.8GHz Pentium D 820, so we decided that this was the best chip with which to compare the Pentium E2140.

The Pentium E2140 was faster at stock frequencies, scoring 1.12 in our Media Benchmarks, compared with the Pentium D 820's score of 0.99. This proves once and for all that the NetBurst architecture was a load of rubbish. The Pentium E2140 chip held its own against the Pentium D in the video encoding test, which is the only saving grace of the NetBurst architecture and its unfeasibly long pipeline.