Chip off the old block
Once its flagship brand, Intel's Pentium moniker lingers on as an indicator of the company's entry-level processors, and has now been updated to the latest Sandy Bridge architecture.
Four more CPUs bring Intel's processor line-up to 70 models, making it ever harder to tell between them - no wonder they're keeping the Pentium brand alive.
All four Sandy Bridge Pentiums are dual-core processors with 3MB of cache. Clock speeds range from the 2.2GHz G620T, through the 2.6GHz G620 and 2.8GHz G840 to the 2.9GHz G850. All but the low-power G620T, which has a 35W TDP, have 65W TDPs and can be paired with either 1,066MHz or 1,333MHz DDR3 RAM.
As a low-end brand, Pentium chips forego features such as hyper-threading and Intel's Turbo Boost technology, present on more premium Sandy Bridge chips. However, these processors do benefit from the integrated graphics chip introduced with this architecture - arguably a more useful addition at this low end of the market than in more expensive processors, which tend to be coupled with dedicated graphics chips anyway.
Pricing ranges from $64 or the G620 to $86 for the G850, with availability from now; as if you didn't already have enough processor options to chose from.
