I'm Having Problems With The E2140

[godbrother]

Hi,

I just set up a new PC for a friend, useing the Pentium Dual-Core E2140 (1.6Ghz 1MB Cache) with 2GB DDR2 800, he also got himself Vista Home Premium, and we've installed that also.

Now, its all good upto this point, but when your doing simple tasks like browsing FireFox, the CPU process goes beyond 70% on task manager. Everything is upto date, all drivers are also upto date. I also got him a 8600GT for HD playback.

I'm on the machine typeing this as we speak, this thing is slower then my Pentium 4 machine. What am I doing wrong?

It has small freezes now and then, and as I'm typing this... The CPU useage is at 68%. When I'm on my Pentium 4 PC, the useage never exceeds 30-40% on normal browsing/listening to music... And thats a Pentium 4!!

Help!

 

[godbrother]

...

 

[godbrother]

Anyone?

 

[godbrother]

To be fair at stock the "E2140" was always a terrible performer, only overclocked they are good because of their big headroom, they can reach near 3 GHz on stock cooling. I would suspect that there is too many background processes eating up your resources that is causing a high CPU usage. Go to MSCONFIG and disable the unwanted applications, also in the Administrative Tools services disable any unnecessary service. If you are not sure how message back and I'll explain.

PS. is your old Pentium 4, is it running Vista Home Premium as well or XP?

I must admit, it was not Vista, and XP that the P4 runs, but still again... This CPU was suppose to wipe the floor with the Pentium D 940. But I just ain't seeing it to be honest. :S

I'm going to downgrade to XP Pro SP3... That should solve the problem I hope. If not, I'm going to need some overclocking tips. At least an overclock to 2.2Ghz on stock cooling.

 

[godbrother]

Architecturely a full blown Core 2s do wipe the floors with the old Pentium D's, no question

But you have to remember the PD 940 (3.2 GHz) was by default clocked very high and was "high end" at the time, the E2140 lowend is clocked very low (1.6 GHz), to add further insult to injury the E2140 is a crippled core 2 because it only has 1 MB of cache opposed to the usual 6MB in a high end core 2 duo such as the E8400. If you can overclock the E2140 to atleast 2.5-3.0 GHz it would be leaps and bounds better.

How much ram has both rigs got?

You have to take into consideration that the minimum ram requirements for XP and Vista are different. XP is happy enough with 1 GBs of ram whilst Vista needs 2 GBs of ram.

Yeah, the Vista rig had 2GB's of RAM, and 1.04GB's where being used at just idle. Thats why I personaly hated Vista. My XP rig only ues around 190MB on idle.

I'm going to downgrade to XP to see if that helps, if not, then I'm doing somthing wrong... Or the CPU is or could be going faulty.

 

[godbrother]

Oh, I would like to overclock it, the thing I found strange is you said it could overclock to 3.0Ghz on stock cooling. I find that a bit to much don't you think? I mean, on stock cooling?

if it is as you say, I would by far be more then happy if it reaches 2.5Ghz.

 

[TIMELESS52]

Try getting Process Explorer (freeware from Microsoft), run it, and see which process or processes are eating up all those CPU cycles.

 

[godbrother]

More specifically read the overclocking section of the review.

Fair enough, they used a "Zalman CNPS9700 LED air cooler" to achieve 3.4GHz but on stock cooling 3 GHz should be more than possible.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/celeron-e1200_4.html#sect0

Now that IS impressive.

 

[someguy7]

As stated the cpu is not great at its stock speeds. But even so, the system should not hang or freeze or anything for browsing/listening to music. I would either try and slim down vista or just go strait to w7 or xp.

While the cpu is not the greatest it should have zero problems with that basic use.

 

[godbrother]

I'm actually tempted to get a few E2140's on ebay for like 20 bucks just to play around with I can't belive they can overclock so well.

They can overclock past the E5200's overclock limit on stock cooling. That is excelent. Why was no-one informed of this? The sales for the E2140 would have been booming for the budget gamers 😀

 

[someguy7]

It is a well known fact that basically every core based cpu can overclock a good amount. Combine that with a cpu that has a FSB of only 800..... On this chip if you bump the fsb to 333 and you're at 2.66ghz already.