CPU Upgrade

[leo88]

I have a mainboard with 865GV chipset that can support Core 2 Duo & Pentium Dual Core at 800 FSB. My current processor is Pentium 4 531 3.0Ghz Prescott & planning to upgrade to Pentium Dual Core at 2.2Ghz. My questions are:
1. Can a Pentium 4 531 perform at par or slightly slower than Pentium Dual Core even though it has a much higher clock speed & Hyper-Threading support?
2. Or is it practical to maintain my current processor & upgrade my RAM instead from 1 gig to 2 gigs of DDR-400?
3. Or to upgrade to dual core processor and maintain my current 1 gig DDR-400 RAM?
Which of the two options is better in terms of performance gain?

 

[Newf]

IMO, none of the above.
Spending money on something really old to upgrade something ancient is not useful.
When you can afford a new $100 AMD Propus cpu, 2x1GB ram and a matching <$100 motherboard then you will see a noticeable performance improvement.

 

[c_schwab]

I agree with what Newf said. You will probably not see a very big difference upgrading your RAM or processor.