Advantages: size, weight reduction, great performance
Disadvantages: smaller expansion cards needed.

...as it is Black as opposed to the Silver fronted case. What is predominant at the front of the case is the massive ventillation slots. Good ventillation means great cooling. It also contrasts to the tower DC7700 with smoothed corners as opposed to the angular and sharp design of the tower. Due to its height, the expansion of this PC is limited. The PCI and AGP sockets inside the case are fiddly to access and also not full size. Hence the name small form factor. Therefore your standard PCI network cards, sound cards,etc will not fit this PC. This means that you will need special cards to expand this PC. Saying this, you should not neet to expand it for some time. This PC comes with 1Gigabyte of ram installed, a 160Gb hard drive and a 2.13Ghz Intel Core 2 Due processor that is more than enough performance for all but the highest level office staff... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Good performance, Great value, Low power consumption, Stability
Disadvantages: None

...A good friend of mine bought this processor and immediately tested it to see the advantages of 4 MB of cache. This new Intel core 2 processor E6420 replaces the old Core Duo E6400, and has a series of notable advantages over the latter one. I tested both products and one thing is sure, by adding two extra MB on the processor die, the performance increased quite a little. I've tested both processors in several aplications and the speed difference varies from almost none (rendering), to notable in encoding, compressing, multimedia (3-6 % speed increase) and to maximum 7-9% speed increase in games and this at the same price like E6400 processor. The speed is just great for it's price and if you thing it isn't fast enough this processor is highly overclockable. my tested version worked until 3.15 Ghz with the stock cooler included... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Fast quick reliable, functional and cheap
Disadvantages: preinstalled software can cause set up headaches.

.... There are also 6 USB sockets as well as 1 Parallel port for older style printer connections, 1 serial port for specific devices (we use ours for connection to our door entry system) as well as the older style PS/2 keyboard and mouse connections. There are 4 expansion slots at the bottom of the case for PCI and AGP style cards for sound and graphic type devices should you need them. Inside the Case there is 1 Gig of RAM pre installed to carry out all of the memory hungry applications that modern business needs. This can be expanded with the other 3 expansion slots to 4Gig! while the brains of the box, the processor, delivers 2.4Ghz Pentium Core 2 Duo technology. This comes in the E6400 version that was being used up until August. The newer PCs comes with E6600 technology but you are unlikely to notice any performance difference. Sound is somehow... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average very helpful

Advantages: Cheap, Good Performace
Disadvantages: Not HT, L2 Cache could be bigger, Easy to install if you know how.

...the processor relatively quick and very capable for everyday tasks and even gaming (when paired with a good graphics card). It is available in the older Northwood core or the newer Prescott core, I chose Northwood because prescott run hotter, but the prescott does have 1mb of L2 cache, comapred to the Northwoods L2 cache of 512kb. This makes the prescott slightly better for video encoding. ---------Performance---------- I'll start with the most important aspect of any processor, performance. I bought this processor as an upgrade to a 1.7ghz 400FSB pentium 4, and it's one hell of an improvement. I can say through general office tasks like web browsing, word processing etc, it is no worse than a Hyper Threaded (HT) 3.0ghz Pentium 4 Its by no means top dog anymore, there are better and faster processors out there, working on new technology... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: Performs Well
Disadvantages: Expensive

.... Compared to the AMD strategy of 66 MHz incremental releases, Intel continues to lay down the hammer 200 MHz at a time, and at some point the performance deadlock has to break. The Pentium 4-2.4 GHz is a standard Pentium 4 based on the Northwood core. This means a 400 MHz FSB (front-side bus), a 0.13-micron die, and 512K of L2 cache. The release of the 2.4 GHZ Pentium 4 does not herald the arrival of the 533- MHZ FSB nor any Intel platforms supporting any of the new DDR333 or PC1006 memory technologies. This new CPU is simply another rung on the performance ladder, following along with AMD's strategy of using a faster core to achieve this. The old IPC vs. clock speed argument has taken been around the block a few times, but quite simply both Intel and AMD are taking two different angles towards their new processors. Neither method... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: FAST, Retail box comes with fan, sticker, manual
Disadvantages: More expensive than Celerons, AMDs, etc

...Okay, so I bought myself a motherboard (see Asus P4C800-E Deluxe review) to build a computer but it’s not a computer without the rest of the components. One of these other components I needed was the CPU. “HUH? A C-P-What?!!!”….Well since you ask, I will tell you. CPU is an acronym for Central Processing Unit (aka: Processor). This is the computer’s brain and it plays an important role in a computer. This is where all the information ‘processed’ and where all the calculations are done. Generally, the faster the CPU, the better the performance but there are other factors to take into consideration. It usually looks like a square metal thing, with gold pins underneath but Pentium 3’s have a single connector that slots into a slot rather than use pins. The CPU I am reviewing is Intel’s Pentium 4 (P4 for short) 3.2GHz CPU. This one has... Read review

Ciao members have rated this review on average helpful

Advantages: 64-bit future proofed, speedy, excellent value for money
Disadvantages: Dual core AMD 64 CPUS are faster... but hey it would make this CPU cheaper so it's not all bad!

...meant less heat would be generated, and the closer contacts would pass information more quickly. But that's as much in common both the CPU companies had with each other, as their other methods of manufacturing and selling their CPUs differ immensely. Intel sported a 'clock-speed sells' stance, trying to clock their CPU speeds at really high frequencies i.e. 3.2GHz, 3.4GHz. This meant that the CPU ran immensely hot, drew a lot of power and Intel discovered they couldn't clock their CPUs any higher than 3.8GHz. They hit a bottleneck. The heatsink and fan provided by Intel for their CPU in their retail boxes only just manages to keep the CPU stable at just slightly above 70 degrees Celsius. A lot of people opted to use water-cooling if they wanted an Intel CPU. AMD on the other hand chose a different path and had their