Intel® Processor Numbers

Intel® Core™ processors

Processor numbers for the Intel® Core™2 family and Intel® Core™ Duo and Solo brands are categorized in 4-digit numerical sequences with an alphabetical prefix.This five character identifier captures the power and performance class and features of Intel® Core™ processors. The letter prefix indicates the power and performance class

Processor numbers for the Intel® Core™ i7 processors are categorized in three digit numerical sequences, preceded by the i7 identifier.

A higher number within a processor class or family generally indicates more features, including:
· Cache
· Clock speed
· Front Side Bus
· Intel® QuickPath Interconnect Speed
· New Instructions
· Other Intel® technologies¹
Note that a higher number processor may have more of one feature and less of another

Searching for the best intel uATX motherboard intel rumors and other intel joy

Rumor has it that intel will cut the price on the quad-core "Kentsfield" Q6600 processor to $266 around July. The link is in Chinese, look at the image halfway down the page (the image is in English).If true, that could be the hot (no pun intended) seller of the summer. I think I'll hold off on buying a Core 2 Duo for now. Also, don't forget that intel is expected to induce price drops to the Core 2 line on April 22nd...the above mentioned Q6600 should be dropping to $530, currently $851.Last summer the local Fry's Electronics had a bundle consisting of a Pentium D 930 (dual-core 3 GHz Pentium 4) and a low-end ECS motherboard for $169. The processor alone was retailing for more then $169 so I snapped it up. It had been working fine but one of the drawbacks of the included "better then free" motherboard was that it did not support dual-channel mode for the RAM. The memory performance was absolutely horrible, with single channel DDR-400 RAM it benchmarked worse then a Athlon XP 1600+ and not that much better then a Pentium III combined with SDRAM! This past weekend I decided to upgrade to a better motherboard, one that could also provide future support for a Core 2 Duo or Quad as well as better memory performance. My case only supports micro ATX motherboards and at first I did not realize how limited my options were. With the idea for overclocking in mind the best motherboard I could find was the

Gigabyte GA-965GM-S2

The GA-965GM-S2 is centered around the intel Express G965 chipset, featuring four SATA 3.0 connectors and one PATA connector for legacy optical drives. Gigabyte adds their own SATA 3.0 RAID controller that provides two SATA 3.0 connectors, and of course the chipset provides legacy connectors such as a floppy connector and serial/parallel/PS2 ports. A 1000BaseT ethernet connector and IEEE 1394 connector are included on the back panel, along with four USB 2.0 ports. The motherboard features one PCI Express x16 slot for a video card, two regular PCI slots, and a single PCI Express x1 slot. The motherboard also has headers for six additional USB 2.0 ports, SPDIF out, and two additional IEEE 1394 connectors. Not to forget anything the board also features 8-channel high definition audio and perhaps the best of all, integrated intel GMA X3000 graphics (more on that later). Sounds like alot for a micro ATX motherboard, and indeed it is too much as my case was only able to utilize half of the internal connectors and headers

The motherboard took my Pentium D 930 with no issue, although I have issue with the high stock temperatures that the processor gives off. That is not a fault of the motherboard but rather an unfortunate side-effect of the Pentium 4's NetBurst architecture.Moving from single channel DDR-400 RAM to dual channel DDR2-800 RAM yielded an impressive improvement in memory bandwidth, with Everest Ultimate 3.5.0 showing a memory read score of 6381 MB/s and memory latency of 95.6 ns