Intel Core i3-530, 2x 2.93GHz, boxed suggestion
 

If you just want a cheap, fast and overclockable dual core cpu get an Intel Core i3-530, 2x 2.93GHz. Overclockable over 4 Ghz (tried it with a friends pc) and not very expensive (only the DDR3 ram is a little bit pricy).

For a quad core cpu get the Core i5 750 ...

[QUOTE=joblack;206891]If you just want a cheap, fast and overclockable dual core cpu get an Intel Core i3-530, 2x 2.93GHz. Overclockable over 4 Ghz (tried it with a friends pc) and not very expensive (only the DDR3 ram is a little bit pricy).

For a quad core cpu get the Core i5 750 ...[/QUOTE]

This looks pretty good, I would be interested to see the performance results of this CPU running 2 LL's on 1 physical and 1 hyperthread each.

[QUOTE=hj47;207918]This looks pretty good, I would be interested to see the performance results of this CPU running 2 LL's on 1 physical and 1 hyperthread each.[/QUOTE]

I think the consensus here is to avoid using hyper-threading on prime95/mprime if you can. Only run one mprime task per (full) core and if you must enable hyper-threading, leave the pseudo-processors idle or just let them handle other jobs.

prime95/mprime is generally main memory bandwidth constrained for LL tests, as I understand it, so any extra CPU power released via hyper-threading is consumed in the memory bottleneck. I suppose you could have a very unusual configuration with very fast memory and slow CPUs where all this could change but I wouldn't expect it.