Pros: Performance: Not only can you overclock the E8400 to the moon (>4.0 GHz on high end air), the Penryn core has the highest IPC of any x86 core until Intel Nehalem next year. So you get high clocks + high IPC = ridiculous raw computational horsepower. Power use: Great power and speed is only half the story. You get all that for relatively little power consumption. In perf/watt the E8400 is much better than 65-nm Conroe, is far better than AMD 65-nm Brisbane, and absolutely destroys AMD 90-nm Windsor. SSE4: Hidden potential. Multimedia apps & games will likely start including SSE4 code later this year, giving Penryn users an instant performance boost.

Cons: You kidding? None. The stock HSF isn't great but it's adequate for the rated speed and you can probably get 3.6 GHz out of it easy.

Overall Review: The main decision is whether to get this or wait for the mainstream Yorkfield quads to be launched. Well, keep in mind that with a given HSF you can probably get a few hundred more MHz out of this Wolfdale than out of a Yorkie. So you have to ask yourself if you run anything that makes substantial use of four cores. Pure gamers like me are currently best served with the fast Wolfdale, and this will likely hold true for another year or so before quad-optimized games start to really see the light.