Hi all,

A question about P4s if I may, I've never used them (AMD man myself) so I'm not sure, and Google isn't proving very useful on such old tech.

Does anyone know, in the context of a Socket 478 motherboard, if:

A Northwood will perform better than a Prescott, or vice versa?

And if I will see much benefit to using a 3.4GHz instead of a 3.2GHz P4. I can get hold of a 3.2GHz for around £10-£15, but a 3.4GHz is more like £25-30. Would the performance boost justify the extra?

PS. OC'ing is out of the window, so we're looking at stock speeds...

When I saw the title of the thread, I laughed. They're both gay.

However, Prescott is way more inefficient and hotter running. Northwood every day of the week - easy.

If you're an AMD man, then you should recognize Prescott as the thing that got thrashed by 939 Athlon 64s

+1, but it's all I've got to work with.



Even though the Prescott sports a larger L2 cache and supports SSE3?

Prescott is faster but hotter.

I had a 3.0GHz and it ran at 70c standard, 90 under load.

Why can you only use P4s?

Because the PC I'm reviving has a 478 mobo.

So for gaming, are we talking a stock speed Northwood or a Prescott?

Is a stock 478 cooler going to handle a Prescott then?

I have a spare socket 775 mobo kicking around if you want it - think it still works.

Sorry, I've misunderstood. You can't overclock then? At stock speeds a Prescott will be marginally faster, but I couldn't deal with the noise/heat and the extra performance won't be noticeable by today's standards.

if theyre running at the same mhz, the older northward is actually faster in most tasks than the prescot.
The Prescott's can run at higher frequencies and are better at predictable tasks like encoding.

I warn you, I'm on a P4 Northwood atm. It's combined with a P4C 800E Deluxe (one of the better boards), 2GB of RAM and a512mb HD3850.

I've overclocked it to 3.5GHz and its still completely useless.

480p playback is just manageable, but the latest game I can play with medium settings is Fallout 3 - and even then the average frame rate is only 18! Low settings gives it around 26 but it just looks so horrible that it's unbearable.

TF2 (a source game going on for 4 years old) has to be run in DX8 with a fully config that makes the game look like DOOM to get an average of 25fps.

CS:S is pretty much the same story and that's even older (nearly 6 now iirc).

Don't buy a P4 system for gaming, unless its for games from the 90's!