14 DAY TRIAL // World’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, multinational company Intel is in the habit of switching processor sockets and platforms once every two years, thus forcing the customers to spend more on new motherboards and upgrades.
That doesn’t mean that the whole solution is somewhat cheaper or that it brings significant advantages.
Intel’s platforms are still considerably more expensive than AMD’s and by launching two new affordable Ivy Bridge processors, Intel hopes to make the socket 1155 a bit more accessible.
The first new addition to the company’s product line is the Pentium G2100T that runs at a default 2600 MHz frequency and has two cores and a 3MB level 3 cache size.
This chip comes with a simple HD graphics iGPU that runs at 650 MHz and can clock up to 1050 Mhz.
The nice surprises are the $75 (60 EUR) price for an Ivy Bridge based CPU and the modest 35 watts TDP.
The second novel processor launched now is the Pentium G2120 that has the same features as the previous processor presented here, but runs at 3100 MHz and has a 55 watts TDP.
Buying a socket 1150 PC this winter will not make much sense as Intel will move to socket 1150 with new chipsets and motherboard early next year, once Haswell architecture will be implemented.
The new Pentium CPUs recently launched will make the socket 1155 platform more affordable for the budget customer, but future upgrade possibilities are equal to none if a Haswell CPU is desired and the buyer will be limited to Ivy Bridge processors.