I know, but there's always someone who doesn't know this and you've got to tell him. Buying anything P4-ish is just a stupid waste of money and people who ask about them obviously don't know it; that's why I aways want to tell them this first. Aside from the fact that Pentium4s and Ds perform like crap and are not worth their price at all, they give you heat issues too; many of their owners have had heat or noise issues related to heat so why not tell these people the truth?!
There are a couple of situations where buying a NetBurst chip would not be stupid. Intel changes the chipset and motherboard specs required to run new CPUs pretty frequently, so odds are that a specific LGA 775 motherboard bought more than a year ago won't run any Core-based chips but will run all or most of the NetBurst ones. If you're an Intel fan and got an LGA 775 Pentium 4 system on the ubiquitous 945 or higher-end 955 chipset a couple of years ago, it is a very cheap and powerful upgrade to plop a higher-clocked P4 Cedar Mill or especially Presler Pentium D 900 series in there. The Pentium Ds and Pentium 4s are dirt cheap now, and I'd surely jump at the chance to replace something like a 3 GHz Prescott 530 with a higher-clocked Pentium D 900 chip like the 945. Especially when the Pentium D only costs something near $100. Keep your board, RAM, and other stuff and massively increase your performance on multi-threaded applications (and increase it some on single-threaded ones as well.) Not a bad deal. The noise and heat would not be an issue to somebody who's upgrading a Prescott. The 65 nm Preslers and Cedar Mills are cooler than many of the P4 Prescotts even though they hay have more cores and are clocked higher.
Now if you're talking about getting a new system...yeah, I agree with you 100% as there are much better setups out there for what a Cedar Mill P4 or Presler Pentium D setup would cost. The AMD Athlon 64 X2 particularly comes to mind as the lower-range Brisbane X2 4400+ will run with the fastest Pentium D (965 EE) while consuming roughly half the power. The Core 2 Duo E6400 will be a bit faster than the 965EE but costs more than the X2 4400+. Every higher Athlon 64 X2 and Core 2 Duo will beat all Pentium Ds, in some cases by a very wide margin.Nice
sensible post MU. People are
so fast to jump on Netburst's inefficiency's/problems, that they would rather shoot their dog, than admit there might be a use for them.(and i don't mean target-practice).