I3 2120 vs i3 540 OC

The i3 540 would win at 4ghz vs the 2120 but not by much.

Can you oc the 2120 at all? Also as its 1155 and has upgrade potential would you recommend the 2120?
Cheers

you can't OC the 2120 at all.

I would recommend it over the i3 540 tho.

Its pretty fast without OC and the upgrade path is a lot better, you might even get ivybridge support with your mobo depending on what you buy.

I was looking at this mobo, Would it support ivybridge? - http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=...

Generally speaking, the performance improvement from 1st gen Core i3 to 2nd gen Core i3 is about 12%. Therefore, a Core i3-2120 @ stock speed is basically equal to a Core i3-540 clocked at 3.7GHz.

Based on what I've read you can overclock the Core i3-2120, but you have to do it the "old fashion" way by increasing the frequency assuming your motherboard allows you to. However, you cannot overclock too much because everything is tied to the frequency. An increase of perhaps 300MHz is possible before things like the USB ports are no longer responsive. Overclock way too much and you can damage the motherboard.

Therefore, it should be possible to overclock a Core i5-2120 to 3.6GHz which is basically equivalent to a Core i3-540 clocked to 4.0GHz.

Thanks mate, I think im gonna go for the 2120 then

no way to tell right now, all depends on if gigabyte will release updated bios.

The highest that I have seen people push the base clock on 1155 is only 110mhz, very few get passed 105mhz  

Hi guys I've just seen this thread and thought i'll give a little info from my side.

I have just built a new rig 2 moths ago and have to say it was an awesome idea to go with the 2120, because its simply enough for everything until now (It even runs BF3 very smoothly with a 6870). And my plan is simply to upgrade to a more extreme processor of the ivy bridge series in 1 to 2 years.

The overclocking ability is very limited indeed. The only way to do it is via the BCLK. For me it went from stock 100 to 106, resulting in a clock speed of 33*106 = 3.5 GHz. According to what I read, for this kind of overclocking the Chipset matters the most. That's another reason I went with a Z68 board (besides the ivy bridge compatibility).

Another thing I did not expect, is that you can run pretty high speed memory on the I3 as well. I put some Corsair vengeance in there and they are currently running @ 1700 MHz with the stock timings and @ 1.48 Volts (stock 1600 MHz * 106 BCLK).

Hope this helped a little ;-)

All SB derivative cpu(s) have pretty much the same memory controller and can support even higher speeds unofficially.

Thanks, I didn't know that. All I knew, was that the I3 officially only supports up to 1333 MHz RAM. That's why I was so amazed by the achieved 1700 XD

You can push it up to 2133 I think and gain performance improvement from it.