For a little over $130 you can now buy a dual core processor but the question is, is it any good? We answer that question and a few more in the process in our first ever cheap dual core shootout.



We chose a wide variety of CPUs to include in this comparison mostly based on price, after all we are interested primarily in value here. The list of CPUs and our reasoning behind including them follows below:

Intel Pentium D 920 (2.8GHz, dual core, 2MB L2 per core), Current Price: $244 Intel Pentium D 820 (2.8GHz, dual core, 1MB L2 per core), Current Price: $160 Intel Pentium D 805 (2.66GHz, dual core, 1MB L2 per core), Current Price: $133 Intel Pentium 4 631 (3.0GHz, single core, 2MB L2), Current Price: $185 Intel Celeron D 351 (3.2GHz, single core, 256KB L2), Current Price: $110 AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (2.0GHz, dual core, 512KB L2 per core), Current Price: $295 AMD Opteron 165 (1.8GHz, dual core, 1MB L2 per core), Current Price: $316 AMD Opteron 144 (1.8GHz, single core, 1MB L2), Current Price: $177 AMD Athlon 64 3000+ (1.8GHz, single core, 512KB L2), Current Price: $120

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