Pentium D 840 vs Celeron 430

[GotNoRice]

I'm piecing together a computer out of spare parts that will be used for light office duty. It's come down to these two CPUs, but there is disagreement as to which one will be better.

The Celeron 430 is based on the Core architecture, but it is single-core and only 1.8Ghz.

The Pentium D 840 is basically a dual-core Pentium 4, but the clockspeed is much faster at 3.2Ghz

I feel that the Pentium D 840 would be better for most situations. This is because I notice many programs or tasks, even background tasks like Anti-Virus can now easily peg a single core at 100%. Having a 2nd core to work with, even if each one is slower individually, should be better in the end. The 3.2Ghz vs 1.8Ghz clockspeed difference should also make up at least a bit of the IPC difference between the architectures. Can anyone think of a reason the 430 might be better aside from heat and power consumption?

 

[GreenMonkey]

If it's a socket 775 box, how about burning $10 or so on ebay and getting a cheap dual-core core 775?

I've got an e2160 in my htpc/media server. You can get one for like $5-$10 on ebay.

Unless the board isn't core2 compatible?

 

[pxc]

A "full" Conroe-based chip with fast FSB (1066MHz) and full L2 cache size (4MB) can beat a Netburst processor @ a 2x higher clock speed in many cases. That Celeron 430 (Conroe core) only has an 800MHz FSB and 512KB L2 cache and doesn't do quite as well. http://ixbtlabs.com/articles2/cpu/intel-celeron-420-440-page1.html

The Pentium D 840 is going to be a bit faster in most cases, but not significantly fast enough to make up for the very high TDP IMO. My only concern with the 840 is if it's an "office system" that the motherboard may not support a 130W processor. Some motherboards only support "05A" platform compatibility (up to 95W TDP CPUs only) and you would need to verify compatibility with "05B" to run a 130W TDP processor.

I agree with GM: neither of the two processors are very good, and an E2160 would be significantly faster. If the motherboard is compatible with the Celeron 430, which is Conroe based, it should work with other Conroe-based Core 2 processors.