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Pentium Tiers?

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P4 and Pentium-D are LGA775 history.

Today's LGA1155 Pentiums are LGA1155 and are effectively i3-2xxx without hyperthreading. They're the G-series (G5xx/G6xx/G8xx) Pentiums and start around $45.
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Pentium, like Celeron, is just a trademark which Intel insists on hanging on it like a childhood teddybear.

The actual pentium processor lineups are: Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III, Pentium 4, Pentium D

These don't mean much though because Pentium 4 alone had 5 different core revisions across 4 die shrinks and spanned 3 sockets on the desktop alone (socket 423, socket 478, socket 775).

Now pentium is just a generic identifier for low end Intel processors and does not refer to a particular chain of architectures.

Core 2 processors are based off of the Core microarchitecture which itself is based off the Pentium III (P6) architecture.

Nehalem takes some features from Core 2 and some from Netburst but is an entirely new architecture.

Sandybridge is a heavily revised version of Nahelem

jay_nar2012 said:
There are PGA478 P4, core2 based pentiums (E series)....

OP was looking to upgrade his friend's PC. Since LGA775 is history, PGA478 would be even more "historier" and not something OP should want to upgrade to.

He asked about something "Pentiummy" and the only Pentiums worth buying currently (unless there are special circumstances dictating otherwise) are the G-series.

jay_nar2012 said:
If you get a G-series pentium then you will need a new mobo and RAM.

Whatever OP is upgrading from, nothing LGA775 or older is worth finding a new CPU for unless looking for a Core2Quad. Better off spending $150 on a CPU+motherboard+RAM upgrade otherwise.
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