Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 / 3 GHz

Top Over-clocker! The E0 stepping version of this CPU is a PC enthusiasts wet dream! These little beauties, with the right mobo, over-clock brilliantly. You do not have to push the VCore to far at all to jump straight to 4GHz. I ran one of these in my old rig for nearly a year, overclocked at just a touch over 4GHz. VCore around 1.36v, it would have gone higher but I was limited by the cooler I was using at the time. As time progresses the quad core will take over, and more and more games and apps will be coded with multi-threading in mind but at the moment these CPU's still punch well above their weight. This is a cracking CPU for a second rig or ...  Read the complete review

This is the processor I am using day in and day out and it is by far the best piece of hardware I have ever owned. Not only does it work perfectly and stay cool, it over-clocks like no tomorrow. I have my little E8400 running at 4.0Ghz on air-cooling which was a lot easier to set-up than I first thought it would be. I was truly amazed at just how much juice this processor could put out without seemingly batting an eye-lid. Of course you will require some pretty good cooling to pull this off, but you can get coolers like the Arctic Freezer 7 Pro or the Xigmatek HDT for around £20 which will be much better than Intel's original cooler that comes with the retail ...  Read the complete review