Pentium Dual Core E2180 Benchmarks And Overclocking

This past May I was able to get a used Pentium Dual Core E2180 for pretty cheap off of eBay. It's a dual core Conroe (Although I think everyone refers to them as "Allentown") chip running at 2.0 ghz (10x multiplier) with 1mb of L2 cache, and a thermal design of 65 watts. While the chip doesn't run as cool as the 35 watt Conroe based single core Celerons, the Pentium Dual Core E2180 still runs very cool, and can easily be overclocked to 2.6ghz on pretty much any Socket 775 motherboard that a) supports the chip & b) allows you to set the bus speed from 200 to 260.

I've been using the chip on and off over the past several months and have decided to post some quick benchmarks for the chip in it's original 2.0 ghz glory, as well as in 2.6 ghz overclocked glory.

I've used the chip in two boards, both based off of Intel's 945 chipsets. Both boards are old (18+ months). If you are interested in buying a cheap setup, you will be happy to know that pretty much any Intel 945 board will allow you to get the E2180 upto 2.6 ghz without any problems. In fact for these tests I am using a Asrock Wolfdale1333 board that I purchased for $30 USD. Like the Core 2 based Celerons, these Pentium Dual Core ships easily allow you to get a 30% speed increase with a simple overclock.

Here is the CPUID screenshot of the E2180 at stock speed;



I used SuperPI to get a 1m time of 29 seconds at stock speed (2.0ghz);



I also used Geekbench 2 (my favorite benchmark tool), and the system scored 2199. The full results of the Geekbench test at stock speed can be seen here.



As you can see from the results, a year ago they may have looked fine, but now the numbers look a bit dated when compared to all the new chips that have come out. While the E2180 is a great chip at 2.0ghz, its a fantastic chip if you overclock it to 2.6ghz, which is easily done.

You don't have to worry about heat if you overclock the E2180 to 2.6ghz; the temperatures remain constant regardless if the chip is 2.0ghz or 2.6ghz. If you have SpeedStep activated, you even have less to worry about.

To instantly get a 30% speed increase of your Pentium Dual Core E2180, enter your BIOS, find your CPU settings, and change the bus from 200 to 260. Save and exit. Here are some pictures of my BIOS;






At 2.6ghz, you can see the difference. The score in Geekbench 2 goes from 2200 at 2.0ghz to 2870. You can see the full Geekbench results here.

SuperPi manages to calculate to 1m in 24 seconds.



Here's the CPUID screenshot of the chip at 2.6ghz;





Overall the E2180 is a fantastic chip. Intel has made new Wolfdale based Pentium Dual Core chips, which pose a problem to people who can't afford to spend a lot on computers. The problem is the new Wolfdale Dual Cores are $80+ USD and require a motherboard that supports the Wolfdale processors. Older Pentium Dual Cores such as this E2180 can be found pretty cheap, and Intel 945 based motherboards are also very cheap and allow you to easily achieve a 30% increase in speed.

And About The Whole Via Nano Thing...

Back in May of this year, I posted that I was excited about Via's new Isaiah processor. When I posted, I stated that I was mainly excited to see if the new processor would actually live up to the small hype that Via had presented, or if history would repeat itself and the new processor would be like its predecessors and fall into the shadows.

Well guess what. It seems as if history has repeated itself. Via officially announced the processor as the Via Nano in late May, stating that the processor would be ready for purchase within a couple of months.

It's now almost December, and I still can't find any netbooks powered by the new chip, or any small motherboards with the chip installed. What's even worse is that the few news articles I have read show the Nano displaying disappointing results. (Sure the Nano beats the Intel Atom in some benchmarks, but it was supposed to be so much better than that and didn't Via make a video of the Nano running that Crysis game?).

I thought that by now HP would be using the new chip in the HP 2133 successor, but it appears they switched to Intel's Atom chips. nVidia has also announced that they have stopped working with Via on a mobile chipset for the processor; really was this a big surprise?

Seriously, I find Via very entertaining. Every couple of years they promise a new CPU with 'surprising performance, only to have the chip delayed, and when it does get released it simply sucks. What's even more entertaining is the fact that Via actually gets other companies such as HP and nVidia to believe their hype and get the companies to give Via a chance.

I don't think its going to happen again. I would say that I wish AMD or Intel would just buy out Via and their Centaur CPU design team, but its really not worth it.

The eeePC 701 4g Revisited!

In a very weird twist of fate, I once again have in my possession a eeePC 4g 701, the original netbook. I purchased one originally almost a year ago for close to $400, and now there are a wide variety of netbooks out there that are not only cheaper, but vastly superior.

For a month or so I was a big fan of the eee PC. I thought to myself that I could get over the small seven inch display with the weird resolution, and could also get used to that evil keyboard. The fact that I spent $400 probably also had something to do with it.

Still within a few months, I found myself using the 7" laptop less and less, and within six months the little netbook was really of no use to me. But now, with a large armada of different netbooks available, the older 7" eeePCs can be found used for very cheap, and suddenly the thought of using one as a hobby toy has grown on me.

Now that I am looking at the 701 in a hobby way, (I have a couple desktops to play with, as well as a 17" inch laptop.. when I originally had an eeePC it was my only laptop, and for a time, it was my only computer) I am becoming a somewhat fan of it.

The resolution of the thing sucks. There really isn't anything else you can say about it. You can't view modern websites in it, and if you install Windows XP on it, you're going to have problems running software because of the low resolution.

The keyboard is awful. That's all you can say about it. While the keyboard is fine if you are just surfing the internet, it's truly awful in every other aspect. I have no idea why ASUS decided to put a Right Shift key right next to arrow keys, but the poor placement of this key leads me to screwing up during any typing. The fact that the keys on the keyboard are very small allow me to constantly make typing errors. I suppose I could one day grow accustomed to the smaller keys, but I really don't see myself putting forth the effort.

The 701 is a hobby machine for me now; I've spent the past couple of days trying various operating systems on the unit. A year ago, I had Windows XP on a 701, but after a month of usage, the boot time had increased to several minutes. Right now I am using something I found called eeebuntu (I found several Linux distributions based off of Ubuntu, so I am unaware if this is an 'official' fork of Ubuntu).

Because this new 701 (well new to me, anyways) is used, I'm not really worried about the warranty and am now deciding on what to do first, either installing a touch screen (DealExtreme has a complete 7" touchscreen kit that fits this unit for $40 shipped) or purchasing a 10400 mAh replacement battery so I can actually use the thing without the AC adapter (the original batteries on these things suck; I can not believe that for a device this small the battery lasts for less than two hours). I purchased a $5 4gb SDHC card to help deal with the small 4gb SSD, but because this is a Surf model, the SSD is soldered directly to the board and can not be replaced.

We'll see what else I can do with this thing.

Windows 7 Boot Time Compared To Windows Vista

I managed to get a pre-beta copy of Windows 7 installed on my Acer Extensa laptop this past weekend. I became interested in Windows 7 after hearing all the news of how it is supposed to pretty much be just like Windows Vista, only with the speed of XP (or something like that). While this is only a prebeta, I was able to install it on the laptop with little problems. For the record, the laptop has a 1.86ghz Pentium Dual Core CPU running on a 533 mhz bus, 3gb of 533mhz DDR2 RAM, a 250gb 5200rpm hard drive (with four partitions), and integrated Intel x3100 graphics.

I have to say, that even though its a beta version of Windows 7, the thing installed quickly. When Microsoft says that you can install Windows 7 within 10 minutes, believe them. On this laptop, the complete install took less than 20 minutes on battery power. Using the AC adapter, Windows Vista takes the better part of an hour to get itself running on the laptop.

The big thing I am concerned about is boot time. It takes Windows Vista 58 seconds to reach the login screen, and once I log in it takes at least thirty seconds to load the gadget bar (or whatever its called), as well as my virus scanner, chat clients, etc before I can actually start working.

After reading so many articles about Windows 7 boost in performance, I was excited to see how long the same scenario would take with Windows 7 (compared to Vista). The result? It takes Windows 7 53 seconds to reach the login screen. So only a five second difference, right? Wrong. Once I enter my password, Windows 7 presents me with my desktop, ready to work within 10 seconds. This includes loading the Windows gadgets, and my startup programs. In this aspect, I am very excited because hopefully by the time Windows 7 ships the difference will be even greater.

Performance wise, I really can't call Windows 7 any faster than Vista; my laptop handles Vista extremely well (besides the long boot time). Vista is indeed bloated, but the computers being sold today are a lot better than those available when Vista was introduced, and thus can easily handle the bloat. This Extensa came with three gigabytes of memory; less than a year ago when I purchased an Inspiron 1525 and I found Vista to be very sluggish, but that was mainly due to the fact that the laptop only had one gigabyte of memory. This laptop (the Acer Extensa 7620) is by no means a 'fancy machine'; it was purchased for less than $600 (less than what I had spent for the Inspiron).

Other than the boot time, I can't really judge Windows 7 at this point (because it is not even in beta form at this point). The new Superbar sounds very exciting on paper, but its current form is pretty disappointing. I am not a fan at all of the new "ribbon" thing they have going in Paint and WordPad, but am very excited that they added a lot of nice conversion tools in the Calculator application.