Northwood vs Prescott

DaKon · Ville Supporter Joined: 19 Feb 2002 Posts: 2342

Ok I had a 3.2 Prescott ordered but I cancelled the order. I am finding that the 3.2 northwood might be a better chip for gaming (runs tons cooler).

ANy thoughts...and thanks for all the help as in building my new sys

Edit: And with the older Northwood I have now it is overclocked 30% and idles at 25C and at full load gets to maybe 31C
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P4E @ 4.00 Ghz, LeadTech 6800GT 420mhz/1.16Ghz, 1 gb Corsair PC 4400, Creative X-fi, Raptor

Decay · Posted: Fri Feb 04, 2005 7:55 pm Post subject:

Since you already got the chip, I wore bore you with details. Go Northwood all the way. I believe the Prescott only works with a certain chipset...775 I believe? The Northwood 478 chipset out-performs the Prescott.

Not sure what the difference is in price. Haven't looked at them since I bought my 3.0 P4 back in the day...

Thank you, drive through

Clay Pigeon · Posted: Fri Feb 04, 2005 8:30 pm Post subject:

Prescott has 31 pipeline stages, NW has 20. More stages = more penalties for a cache miss or branch miss prediction. It also means an operation takes as many clock ticks as there are stages to complete. An A64 chip has 9 stages. Simply put, a chip with a smaller pipe depth can do more in a shorter amount of time, but smaller pipes generally cannot ramp to as high of a GHz. It is a trade off of sorts.