Northwood or Prescott?

[Phasmagradi]

Just acquired by trade, an Asus p4c800e-deluxe mobo, and was thinking of what cpu core to run on it. Looking through the online vendors.

I notice that 478pin Northwood core p4`s w/ 512k cache are sometimes USD$20+ more than the 478 pin Prescotts w/ the 1mb L2 cache?

Is their a performance issue with cores sporting SSE3? I would build this rig for crunching power (cpu) and some gaming, but not interested in overspending.

Current system:
Machspeed 865pe board.
Northwood p4 3.0ghz.
BFG 6800 GT-OC.

Would I gain any real performance from the 875p mobo, or a Prescott core?


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[o1die]

If you can use your old 3.0, I would try overclocking it to about 3.6. I highly recommend my 2.8c for overclocking, but the best price I could find was $194. The asus board is pretty good, so I wouldn't get the 875p unless you have problems.

 

[RichPLS]

I don't overclock much, but I have a Gigabyte 8KNXP Ultra-64 875 chipset board with Prescot 3200. It is the fastet computer I have owned, and runs hot, but incredibly stable and never once throttled down.
But alot of posters here complain about heat, and it does run hot, but it causes no problems for me.
I have never had stability problems with Intel chips, but I have had stability problems with AMD chips of couple of years ago.


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[endyen]

A P4c will slightly outperform an equally clocked P4e, on average. If you run a lot of progs that take advantage of the extra cache, the P4e will generally be better.
Having said that, I will say that the P4e will run 10 to 15c hotter than the P4c.
The extra heat will have a negative effect on all system components.

 

[jammydodger]

What he said ^

 

[Crashman]

The northwood is a little more responsive and runs a whole lot cooler than the Prescott. It also draws a lot less power.

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