Intel Details CPU Naming Plans Comments

¡qué!

Ugh.

It went 386, 486, Pentium and then I just got lost. For the last however many years I've just bought PCs and crossed my fingers. For instance I go to dabs.com and I get this for Intel desktops (I'm not even going to look at AMD, cos that's just another can of worms):

Intel:
Core 2 Duo (52), Atom (14), Pentium Dual Core (13), Core 2 Quad (12), Pentium (7), Quad-Core Xeon (6), Xeon (4), Celeron Dual Core (2), Celeron (2), Dual-Core Xeon (1)

Wild guessing a reasonable choice I click Core 2 Duo, but who knows really. It sounds good, it's the first on the list. All I know is Atom is for netbooks and Pentium & Celeron sound old. Xeon sounds sexy, but therefore expensive and for gamers so I ignore it. I choose Dual Core from the next list, cos Multi Core sounds like more than I need. So I get the next choice.

Dual Core:
E8400 (17), E8500 (5), E7200 (3), T5750 (1), E4400 (1), T6400 (1), E4500 (1)

E or T, flip a coin time now. And what do all the numbers mean?

I know whatever I get doesn't matter much, I don't play games so I try not to let it worry me, whatever I get I'm sure will be ample for my needs. Hell I was happy with a Pentium I had 8 years or whatever ago so any new PC will be fine. But it just seems despite them going "let's simplify the branding" they really don't. I'd like to make the right choice though, get the fastest machine for my money, but I've really no idea how and nothing I've read has ever explained it.

I totally agree with what HK said!

I looked at Intel's website recently to try to make sense of one of the TR reviews, and I just gave up after a while. This really doesn't help.

I buy from ebay nowadays. Get everything I could afford then leave the rest to dust...

it works