Intel Pentium E2180 - Pentium Allendale Dual-Core 2.0 GHz LGA 775 65W Processor - BX80557E2180

Pros: It over-clocks at stock voltage to 3.0 Ghz, runs cool as a cucumber, and (virtually-speaking) can leap tall buildings with a single bound.

Cons: I can't call them "cons." I bought an E2140 for another member of the fam-dam-ily. The L2 cache is only 1MB -- same as an old Prescott. You get the bandwidth you're willing to pay for, and I wouldn't complain about the price on these.

These E21x0 CPUs are priced less than $20 apart. At forums we speculated about Intel's binning process, quality control and retail specification process. Remember -- Intel is a dominant firm. My over-clocking exercises indicate to me that these E21x0 processors are one and the same. They lock the multipliers at the factory to "product-differentiate." If you get the E2160 or E2140, you can still squeeze the speed out of 'em, but you'll need to twist up the FSB and VCORE.

Overall Review: These things seem to configure under "motherboard" settings (for my mobo, anyway) to 0.003V below the retail-box maximum voltage or 1.35V. With FSB = 800 Mhz stock, they OC well beyond 1,066 (266 host-frequency) to about 1,200+ FSB/300-host-freq without anything more than fixing the VCORE at the 1.3500V value.

Pros: 10x multi, core2

Cons: allendale core

Overall Review: mine hits a wall at 318mhz with 1.465 vcore :( *ip35-e
Oh well, some have to be below average for there to even be an average.
Conroe cores are definitely worth the extra $.
This one was my upgrade from a P4, and just to tie me over until I can justify a quad yorkie.
This would be a good choice for someone who doesn't need a lot of CPU, but wants one that will work on a board that supports 45nm, for future upgrade.