Intel Pentium E2140 Dual Core Processor - HotHardware
However, since these processors don’t push the thermal limits of this heatsink design, Intel has gone for a simple aluminum alloy core instead of a full-on copper core like Core 2 bundled coolers.
While others have pushed these chips further with more exotic cooling, we pushed our chip to **2.9 GHz **with the stock cooler.
Still selling for 95$ … come july we should see another price drop . then these baby’s will actually fight for the budget market with AMD . till then AMD x2 are still the choice .
Given the fact that these are excellent OCers . Who has got enough dough to buy decent ocing mobo that seem out of reach to the budget buyer .
as the review said , great for fun 
The 2140 & 2160 are supposed to be released on June 3rd for $74 & $84.
In August the 2180 will cost $84.
After taking over the performance market…it seems Intel is pushing to take over the budget market from AMD as well.
X-bit labs - New Budget Dual-Core CPUs: Intel Pentium E2160 and Pentium E2140
Pentium E2160 : increasing the processor Vcore to 1.5V we could push the FSB frequency to 378MHz thus hitting 3.4GHz clock speed.
Pentium E2140, didn’t overclock that well at all with 1.5V Vcore, we managed to increase its FSB frequency only to 355MHz.
Influence of L2 Cache Size on Conroe Processors Performance :
During video encoding the size of L2 cache doesn’t affect the performance that much. The results of CPUs with 4MB and 1MB cache differ by about 3-4%.
The same situation takes place during audio encoding. However, this time the performance difference approaches 5% and is primarily noticed when we move from 2MB L2 cache to only 1MB.
Microsoft Office Word 2007 loses a lot of speed when the L2 cache gets smaller. Moreover, if the CPU with a 2MB L2 cache is only 5% slower than its counterpart with a 4MB L2 cache, then further L2 cache size reduction results in a 15-16% performance drop compared with the “fully-fledged†CPU.