Intel E1200/E5200 - Budget CPU Review

[GSte]

Intel E1200/E5200 - Budget CPU Review.

After affiliate13 kindly sent me a Celeron E1200 to have a play with, the Pentium E5200 came on sale, so I bagged one of those to mess around with too, as they are only cheap. I then realised that my own main CPU (an E6600) is now a budget CPU, as they can be bought second hand for £50, so I decided to test the 3 chips together, and do a budget CPU review. I also included an AMD X2 6000+ in a few of the tests to see if it’s true that they are still good value for budget systems. They aren’t. Let’s take a look at the specs of the main CPUs first:





As we can see, the most expensive CPU is the E5200 at £55..... hardly going to break the bank, and could be worth a look if it overclocks well......



Test Setup:

Asus P5B Deluxe;
2 x 1GB Crucial Ballistix PC8500;
Corsair Dominator memory fan;
Seagate Barracuda 500GB 32 MB cache;
XFX 7800GT;
X-Clio 480W PSU;
AC Freezer 7 Pro / Thermalright Ultra 120 Extreme;
Windows XP Home;
Celeron E1200 / Pentium E5200 / Core2Duo E6600.



First of all I found the maximum overclock for each chip. My final results were:

E1200: 1600MHz --> 3104MHz : 94% overclock;
E5200: 2500MHz --> 3814MHz : 52.6% overclock;
E6600: 2400MHz --> 3645MHz : 51.9% overclock.

Unfortunately the Celeron screenshot was lost due to stupidity, I have included one from the Everest benchmarks though, showing the clock speed.











As you can see, the Celeron manages a massive 94% overclock but still ends up over half a gig behind the Conroe and Wolfdale..... so how will they perform in the benchmarks?


I chose a couple of tests that are useful to me, as I use the programs a lot:

DVD Shrink;

AVG – The time a virus scan takes matters to me, so I was interested to see how they’d all perform, particularly the Celeron;

Oblivion – Classic game that I still play occasionally, here I was going to put the settings low so as to remove the graphics card bottleneck, and see more clearly what effect the CPUs and their different L2 cache size would have on gaming performance. But then I thought, hey up...... I always set the graphics as high as I can get them so the game’s still playable, as I’m sure most people do..... typically around 50FPS, so all I’m interested in is how the CPUs affect performance at that kind of framerate;

Super Pi 1M (XS mod 1.5);

Everest Ultimate – Usually used for memory read and write tests, but here I decided just to look at some of the CPU tests: CPU Queen for a general look at CPU performance, and CPU Photoworxx, which should show any differences in L2 cache more clearly.


Okay, on to the results.



Super Pi:




Not many surprises here, we can see quite clearly that the smaller cache of the Celeron has a large impact on its performance at identical clock speeds for all 3 CPUs, but the difference between 2MB and 4MB isn’t that large. Even at 3.1GHz the Celeron can’t quite match the performance of the other two CPUs at 2.5GHz, and at max overclocks it is blown out of the water.



DVD Shrink:





Here anything around 2.4GHz seems adequate, with higher clock speeds and larger caches not yielding much improvement.



AVG Scan:




This was quite an interesting one. Going from 512KB --> 2MB L2 cache improves performance a little (around 5%), with 2MB --> 4MB giving a negligible performance increase. A 50% increase in clock speed for the Wolfdale and Conroe again only gives about a 5% improvement. The effect of the RAM was pretty astonishing to me though. I’ve never really seen any examples of fast DDR2 being necessary, but here going from ~1000MHz --> ~1200MHz increased performance by ~10%, which was a surprise.



Oblivion:




In terms of L2 cache, once again 512KB --> 2MB cache brought the largest increase in performance here. All CPUs performed adequately though, the Celeron needing its max OC to compare closely to the other two.



Everest CPU Queen:




Fairly predictable results in this test. CPU clock speed had a direct impact on results, L2 cache made hardly any difference. The rather erroneous result of the cache comparison, with the Celeron scoring slightly higher than the other two chips can be explained by the Celeron’s test setup having a higher RAM speed at 2500MHz..... 1000MHz as opposed to 800MHz for the other CPUs.



Everest Photoworxx:




This photo work benchmark brought out the difference in cache which was hardly surprising. Interesting to note again here that RAM speed affect the results so profoundly, the extra 243MHz the Celeron had catapulting it far in front of the Wolfdale at identical clock speeds.


Conclusions:

Basically, if you are on a tight budget, a Celeron E1200 at £30 will be adequate for most everyday tasks. Some games which are more demanding of a CPU might make it struggle a little, as would Photoshop, but for £30 I was very impressed with both its performance, and overclocking capacity. Clearly the C2D architecture gives good performance throughout the range, any chip from this family along with a few GB of currently cheap DDR2 will give plenty of grunt for everyday usage. The E5200 also did well, with an impressively high final clock speed. Potentially a good choice if your motherboard can’t reach high FSBs but you want to overclock due to the 12.5x multi, the 2MB L2 cache proving adequate too in most of the tests. And half the price of an E8400 makes it great value. Don’t buy an AMD X2 6000+.

[godsdog]

Good stuff.



....except AVG is the proverbial chocolate fireguard.

[Clunk]

Nice one mate, interesting results and as you say, for £30 it's a steal

[GSte]

Originally Posted by godsdog

....except AVG is the proverbial chocolate fireguard.

I keep hearing that, but I haven't had any problems..... I teach a class at a charity in Bolton as well and they have it on 20 PCs.... never any probs for them either!?!

Have to admit, I have Nod32 on 3 of the machines here though.

[Kelainefes]

Very intersting, thanks.

[godsdog]

Originally Posted by GSte

I keep hearing that, but I haven't had any problems..... I teach a class at a charity in Bolton as well and they have it on 20 PCs.... never any probs for them either!?!

Have to admit, I have Nod32 on 3 of the machines here though.

Let's hope you never get infected with anything because the chances of AVG cleaning it up properly aren't particularly great ...and it's bloatware.

but this is about the review, and a good mini review it is too. I like real budget stuff, finding something that's great value for money that holds it's own against pricier stuff, bargains n' all that.

[affiliate13]

Throughly good read m8,
Really great clocks for that E5200 too. I remember getting a P5B and an E6600 for a friend and the chip costing £240 18mths ago, amazing what £50 will get for you these days.

[supershanks]

Great review mate
Is it possible to bench them using
NMC v 2.0.0.0 so we can place these budget CPUs in comparison to the NMC results.

[GSte]

Aaaaargh, didn't think of it sooner mate, and I'm now in the process of selling the mobo and the E5200..... Will keep it in mind for next time.

[supershanks]

no worries I just find that & Wprime pretty clean benches for grading CPU performance