Intel Cedar mill good for gaming?

Hey guys I have a 775 socket motherboard and i need a new chip, I was told by someone to get the new Intel Cedar Mill but my friend told me its only for servers and wont be that good for gaming I doubt he knows what hes talking about but Id rather be sure and he also told me this chips run very cool you can get 20c idle with stock hsf is this true?

The new Cedar Mills (6x1 series or 6x2 series when released) should be just fine for gaming and will excel when Overclocked. It also depends on how well your motherboard allows you to OC the CPU.

yes they are out, and priced really well in my opinon!

Check newegg.com

I'm about to pick up a 651 (3.4gb), could probably clock it to 4ghz on air (a 20% OC)

Cedar Mill is the 6x1. The 6x2 are VT enabled Prescott 2Ms and have been out longer than Cedar Mill. EIST support will come with the C-1 stepping to be released in April and they will probably be released as the same product numbers along with the higher clocked 3.8GHz 671. The 6x1 does not have VT support as that was meant for the 6x3 which was cancelled. No doubt all the 6x3 stock have been redirected to making Preslers which all have VT support.

And yes, Cedar Mill is released and the preferrable choice over Prescott. You should check to make sure you have a i945, i955 or i975 based chipset though. ATI and nVidia chipsets should work as well. The earlier i915 and i925 chipsets supposedly only support Cedar Mill on a case by case basis.

20 C is pretty low. That's room temperature for crying out loud. I have heard of temps as low as about 23 C for throttled CPUs running at about 800MHz-1GHz with well-ventilated cases and huge HSF setups.

~26 C sounds a lot more likely. That's what I see on my 4200+ idling at 1GHz with a stock HSF and a well-ventilated case. It has a TDP of 89W, which is around what the Cedar Mills have. (Intel uses the UL method of 75% of peak power draw, while AMD uses 100% of peak power draw to compute TDP.) 26 C is a decent idle and I bet one will stay under 45 C under load if it is not OCed.

Don't kid yourself....they hit 5.0 gigahertz on air. A prescott can do 4.0 for christ's sake...
BTW I've seen a 631 hit 4.9 100% stable with Thermaltake Big Typhoon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4#Cedar_Mill

Quoted straight from Wikipedia, as it wraps it up very nicely:
"Cedar Mill

The final revision of the Pentium 4 was Cedar Mill, released in early 2006. This was simply a straight shrink of the 600-series core to 65 nm, with no real feature additions. Cedar Mill is expected to solve the overheat problems of Prescott, as it will have a 86 W TDP. Cedar Mill is a 65 nm core which will feature a 31-stage pipeline (just like Prescott), 800 MHz FSB, EM64T, HyperThreading and Virtualization Technology. Cedar Mill will also have a 2 MB L2 cache. Cedar Mill will be released as Pentium 6x1 and 6x3 at frequencies from 2.8 GHz up to 3.8 GHz."

It doesn't look like a server 'chip' to me guys.

Looks aimed at the gamer & video encoder market, etc

It would be 'OK' in a server / workstation role though, but you'd be better off with a Pentium D, Xeon, or the new Xeon Low Voltage CPU (at 2 GHz it is beating 3.6 GHz Xeons in performance) which is similar to what the Conroe will be later in the year.