i have never heard of buying a dual core cpu insted of a qaud core for the life span lol.
but there is a slight HEAT differnece in the two.
the price of a good quad core cpucompared to dual core there is a difference.
dual cores are generally cheaper^ what he said.
Those temps look fine Rob, but run a stress test as well to test stability.yeah i suppose....
I don't do stress testing because I spend most of my time on my pc.... I do  however play games and they're pretty good stress testers. Seems It can only go about 3.45 GHz without absolutely no crashing.... currently testing 3.6A while back, when I followed overclocking more closely, it seemed certain chips had a higher tolerance for overclocking.  My understanding was that they were engineered to higher specifications (to some extent) but labelled/sold at certain settings.

Could it just be that this chip was engineered with "tighter" tolerances, and there's not enough "WIGGLE" room to overclock?Aegis: I'd say there's a lot of "wiggle room" personally, that's almost a 1GHZ overclock stable there.  the chip's bigger brothers do tend to clock better due to the higher MULTIPLIER, which MEANS the FSB doesn't need to go as high, meaning less voltage and RAM speed adjustments.  it is partly the luck of the draw though, some chips despite being the same stepping and core will just not clock well whilst others do very well indeed.

Rob - if you overclock, I strongly recommend you stress test.  Any instability could lead to corrupted data and random crashes, and you'll never know if it's your OC that's the problem if you don't stress test.  You must sleep sometime . . . run Orthos on Blend then, if it's stable for a few hours I'd say you're good to rock.  The longer the better though and most recommend 12 hours.Agreed, Calum:  I just looked up the processor, which is rated at 2.66 Ghz.  That is a lot of wiggle, and I'd be quite pleased if it sustained that speed in a stable manner!yeah i suppose.... I'm afraid that something would go wrong though?
I could have it running in the day?
Also on another note, I ran bioshock on highest settings for 2 hours and cpu only reached max of 45C! You need a true CPU stress test, games don't tend to stress the CPU all that much any more.
I doubt anything would go wrong, if it does the PC will shut down to avoid damage which would tell you somehting in itself.