Should I get a Northwood instead of a Prescott

[Denis54]

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.

 

[Ned_Flanders]

You seem to know the answer already.

I'd get the Good Old Northwood.

______________
OK it's your choice:
You can have the boat, or you can have the Mystery Box!
...Hey wait a minute! A boat's a boat, but a Mystery Box could be anything. It could even be a boat

 

[Denis54]

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

 

[o1die]

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.

 

[RichPLS]

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

<pre><font color=red>°¤o,¸¸¸,o¤°`°¤o \\// o¤°`°¤o,¸¸¸,o¤°
And the sign says "You got to have a membership card to get inside" Huh
So I got me a pen and paper And I made up my own little sign</pre><p></font color=red>

 

[jammydodger]

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.

 

[endyen]

YES