I was sad to see that the Celeron E1600 was considerbly faster than the Pentium Dual-Core E2610.

In 2006 I paid $99 for a Pentium 4 531 (3GHz, 1MB L2, HT)
In 2007 I paid $99 for a Pentium Dual-Core E2160 (1.8GHz, 1MB L2)

The 2160 beat the P4 in everything I tested, especially media encoding (20 minutes faster for a DVD transcode with AutoGK!), which made the upgrade worth the money. However, it would seem that by the end of 2008, I could downgrade brand names for $99 and upgrade performance again, by getting a Celeron E1600 - even though the E1600 has half the cache of the E2160. It makes me wonder why they would bump the E1600 clockspeed all the way up to 2.4GHz, effectively killing the market for the E21xx series in the demographic these parts are meant for.

Personally, I'll be uppgrading to a Q6600 in 2009/2010 (or equivenltly priced quad core CPU) and swapping out the Pentium4 531 from my file server for my E2160. I may make a nice little key chain with the P4 531 at that point. In the mean time, I could overclock the E2160 if I felt the need, but honestly it's perfectly fine for my needs. I really only play WoW these days (at full everthing and 8x FSAA to boot!).

Anyhow, the E1600 seems to be a real shot in the foot for Intel and the E1200 is a sweet replacement for the 440 in the home server and "old lady desktop" markets. Otherwise, the E2100 series is a better deal. As for AMD, one can not argue that the socket 775 platform has more options than anything AMD has to offer, especially now that Phenom is proving to be pretty incompatible with many existing socket AM2 board (I feel bad for them...). My Asus P5K-VM is a wicked home server board and a decent gaming board, which can be had for just over $100 these days. It has 4 DIMMs, for up to 8GB of RAM, which is nothing to scoff at for the price range.

Truly, when it comes to CPUs, motherboards, and power supplies, it is amazing what one can get for the money these days!

you need to mention the fact that the X2-4000 plus a decent motherboard costs significantly less than the E1200 + a decent motherboard.

Well, I had to try and OC this puppy and without changing anything but the heat sink and I managed to OC to 2 GHz easily(perfectly stable). But I can seem to get past 2GHz without memory dump issues. Even when I down clock my memory. I don't think I should need to adjust the voltage yet being that I tried only clocking it to 2.2 and 2.4 GHz. Oh well, as I said before it's for my wife and my E6600 treats me just fine for UT3 and Crysis.
I Still think this Dual Core Celeron is a great little CPU and she likes it as well for her Photoshop.

Instead of 2160 you should compare the new Celeron and E2140

What is the target EIST VID?

I think all of this is a crock of shit AMD rules and Intels licks hairy balls. AMD runs at higher clock speeds to deliver better performance and Intel sucks balls.

Joe Sasuge Head, you are a fucking retard.

Intel constantly gives better benchmarks then AMD does, so learn the facts and shut the fuck up.

Great review! This has stopped me from making my next Hackintosh a Celeron Dual Core and sticking with the more OEM guns of a Core2 Duo.

Mac Hack Blog @ http://www.espressoreport.com

well made informative review. As usual one of the best to really compare different processors.

Celeron? One of the worst group of processors in the whole world. I would rather prefer to buy some core 2 duo processor from Intel or AMD ATHLON 64X2. It is just much better than Celeron. I actually don't know why people used to buy such processors like celeron. I do really think that Athlon and core 2 are much better and not so expensive.