3.2C or 3.2E?!

[DarkSamurai2003]

What's the difference between:

Intel Pentium 4/ 3.2C GHz 800MHz FSB, 512K Cache, Hyper Threading Technology - Retail

and

Intel Pentium 4/ 3.2E GHz 800MHz FSB, 1MB L2 Cache, Hyper Threading Technology - Retail

 

[Stugots]

3.2C = Northwood
3.2E = Prescott

the real question is whats the difference between a northwood and a prescott...

mhz per mhz, the northwood is generally slightly faster. i couldnt word it right but for the mostpart the northwood is a little faster at the same speed, but there are some applications where the prescott is faster.

the prescott does have double the cache of the northwood, but the reason for this is because the prescott has a longer pipline and needs the extra cache to gain back performance lost from the longer pipline. prescotts have 20 stage pipelins, where as prescotts have 31 stages. intel did this because they wanted to scale speeds higher and had a trouble getting the northwood over 3.4ghz, that why you dont see 3.6+ghz northwoods very often.

prescotts have sse3, which imo will become more and more of an advantage as games and applications begin to use it. you can allready see this a little bit doom 3 where a prescott system will outperform a northwood system.

the prescotts manufacturing process is 90nm, versus the northwoods 130nm. its a smaller cpu that puts out heat. they can be difficult to cool if you plan to overclock. if you plan to do any overclocking with a prescotts thats allready at 3.2ghz, you should consider going to watercooling.

 

[mikemodano9c]

What's the difference between:

Intel Pentium 4/ 3.2C GHz 800MHz FSB, 512K Cache, Hyper Threading Technology - Retail

and

Intel Pentium 4/ 3.2E GHz 800MHz FSB, 1MB L2 Cache, Hyper Threading Technology - Retail

if your interested in the northwood i have one (3.2C, 512k) that is only 4 days old (retail chip that will come in original box with heatsink, manual, etc.) for $230 shipped...

this chip runs at 3.6 completely stable with only a slight bump in voltage from 1.55 to 1.6 volts...