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Should I get a Northwood instead of a Prescott

Forum CPU & Components : CPUs - Should I get a Northwood instead of a Prescott

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I need to chose a P4 3.0 CPU. I am a light user and just want a fast system. I am not a gamer, I do not want to overclock and I want to stay with Intel.

What are the advantages of a Northwood? My priorities are stability, low heat and low noise.

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You seem to know the answer already.

I'd get the Good Old Northwood.

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Reply to Ned_Flanders

I have read several old posts that seemed to imply the Northwood is better, but I would like to understand clearly why.

Reply to Denis54

You listed low heat and noise as priorities. The 1 meg cache prescott frequently runs warmer. The newer versions have a very large heatsink with a noisy fan, and some will even reach high enough temps during normal operation to throttle down. My 2.8c northwood is overclocked to 3640, and I'm still able to use the stock Intel copper heatsink and turn down the fan rpms with a zalman "fan mate 1" to about 2550 at idle. My temps range from 39-60 celcius, depending on usage and room temperature. If you want to use a prescott, I suggest a water cooling setup. The better ones are about $200.

Reply to o1die

Prescott have a longer data pipeline then the norhtys, thus they take more clock cycles to redirect calculations.

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Reply to RichPLS

The prescott has a 31 stage pipeline, compared to a 21stage pipeline with the northwood. This means each instuction has to go though 31 stages. Intel tried to make up for this my giving the prescotts 1MB of L2 cache but it still ends up slightly slower in a lot of apps.
The prescott consumes over 100w of power, the northwood about 70w, the .9nm Althlon64 about 50w and the pentium M about 7-30w.
Prescotts are sone of the hottest desktop processors ever made.

Reply to jammydodger

YES

Reply to endyen

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