Any Intel CPUs significantly faster than my 2 year old 3.4GHz Northwood?

[malG]

It would appear that my 2 year old 3.4GHz Northwood is still faster than the latest 3.4GHz Prescott in most applications. I'm thinking of upgrading to a 955 motherboard. Which Intel LGA775 CPU (excluding EEs) is significantly faster than my current CPU?

Please don't preach about AMD. Thanks.

 

[ryanv12]

That would appear to be the Pentium 4 670 in a lot of benchmarks. Doesn't seem so much faster to warrant about $900 for it though....

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2429&p=1

 

[Vegitto]

AMD. No, seriously. Don't you do it, you'll get stuck to a Prescott. There are no significantly faster processors out there. Yet. Is the current one overclocked? If not, do so, we'll help you. If it is, think about investing in some better cooling.

 

[Lord Banshee]

i am sure the new 3.8GHz will be faster. Not sure what the number is. But you get EMT64 also if that maters to you.

*edit*
I agree with ryan and Vegitto, nothing is too much faster. CPUs have not increase in speed much in past year.

I would overclock what you have currently my Northwood 2.8C gets a nice 500Mhz boost with normal PC-3200 ram and INtel mobo. I am sure a 3.8-3.9 Northwood would eat the living crap out of that 670 Prescott. Then wait till Q1 2006 and upgrade to either a Dual Core AMD or Dual Core Pent-M.

 

[Jeff7181]

None... The 3.6 Prescott would be a bit faster, the 3.8 faster yet, but the 3.8 has heat issues unless you use a high end cooler, and the 3.6 will create significantly more heat than your 3.4 Northwood. I highly doubt you'd see even 10% in real applications by switching to a 3.8 Prescott. I'd stick with what you have until you're ready to make the switch to dual cores and change platforms. If you want more speed, overclock that 3.4 GHz Northwood if you haven't already.

 

[ryanv12]

Prescotts seem to throttle down at times under heavy load, so make sure there's some really good cooling on that sucker if you do end up going that route. And to expand on my earlier reply, processors are going parallel, so if you do upgrade you should get a dual core processor. Intel only makes them up to 3.2 GHz though, so your 3.4 Northwood will still be faster unless you are doing multiple CPU-intensive tasks at once. If I were you, I would just wait until they release a product that is superior to yours.

 

[Markfw]

I'm not going to preach, but what is it you are doing that is too slow for a 3.4 ?

And why consider the 955 mobos (see tomshardware disaster) ?

And why not preach AMD ?

 

[imported_wyrmrider]

what applications do you need more speed?
you could add a second raptor and split off swap file and some applications
would more memory help any of your apps?
but all of this tuning is very application dependent
any multithreaded apps?
anything video card dependent?
are you trying to juggle three balls at once?
getting a big tax writeoff?
I'd wait till things settle down a bit on the multicore front, the OS, the apps
I think the current dual dies on one chipcarrier packg of "dual core" by intel will be shortlived
the unified cache approach to interprocessor communication will be much better
got a good ups? is raid important? mission critical? what's your backup plan if yes?
AMD single or X2 or a 16 way Iwill opetron would be better in some apps- not so in others

wyrmrider

currently building a multiprocessor batch system with discarded PIII's for physics and statistics use so not have to offload to the computer center not the speed there it's the paperwork/ lead time/ schedueling
adding some ram and gb eathernet
switchable pci video and keyboard/ mouse they will run remote
sort of like a personal seti at home- at home

 

[TStep]

I always look at it this way:

Across the board, a 10% increase in cpu speed may yield a 6-7% system speed. If a noticable increase in speed is your prime reason for upgrading (not a platform change or anything else), I wouldn't do it, unless you are using the PC for time critical stuff over long durations. Or if you're a benchmark freak.

The best you could hope for stock would be a ~10% cpu bump (3.4>3.8). A plausible way to check that out and see if you can notice the speed difference, is to underclock your system by 10%, use it for awhile, and see if you can notice that 10% difference. If you cannot, keep what you have. If you can, it only becomes a matter of how much the speed bump is worth to you.

 

[blckgrffn]

Hey, go dual core. 955 was meant for it, after all.

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: Markfw900
I'm not going to preach, but what is it you are doing that is too slow for a 3.4 ?

And why consider the 955 mobos (see tomshardware disaster) ?

And why not preach AMD ?

Because he wants an Intel processor. Whether it's logical or not, that's what he wants. When people keep recommending AMD to someone who wants Intel, that's when people start shouting "fanboy" or "AMD zealot." Everybody by now should know the difference between the two... if not, it'll be obvious in their post. This guy obviously knows what he doesn't want, and he doesn't want AMD. Lets not try to change his mind and have it turn into a flame war. (not saying you'll turn it into a flame war, but others will if you start listing the advantages of an Athlon 64/X2 vs. a Pentium 4/D)

 

[Elcs]

Originally posted by: malG
It would appear that my 2 year old 3.4GHz Northwood is still faster than the latest 3.4GHz Prescott in most applications. I'm thinking of upgrading to a 955 motherboard. Which Intel LGA775 CPU (excluding EEs) is significantly faster than my current CPU?

Please don't preach about AMD. Thanks.

GO AMD /preach

Seriously..... I would look into overclocking the Northwood. I havent done much research into CPU's lately but I dont think any Prescott processors are going to be that much of an improvement. Dual Core Intels are also pretty warm and the risk of throttling is increased.

If you are prepared to overclock, there are quite a few good quides here to help you and support on tweaking is very good.

Overclocking aside, your best bet is probably AMD. As you are against this idea, Im not going to say any more. I dont particularly know what Intel processor would be best for you.

 

[Markfw]

Originally posted by: Jeff7181

Originally posted by: Markfw900
I'm not going to preach, but what is it you are doing that is too slow for a 3.4 ?

And why consider the 955 mobos (see tomshardware disaster) ?

And why not preach AMD ?

Because he wants an Intel processor. Whether it's logical or not, that's what he wants. When people keep recommending AMD to someone who wants Intel, that's when people start shouting "fanboy" or "AMD zealot." Everybody by now should know the difference between the two... if not, it'll be obvious in their post. This guy obviously knows what he doesn't want, and he doesn't want AMD. Lets not try to change his mind and have it turn into a flame war. (not saying you'll turn it into a flame war, but others will if you start listing the advantages of an Athlon 64/X2 vs. a Pentium 4/D)

I specifically didn;t say anything like that for the reason you mentioned. I just wanted to know the answer to some questions as to his needs and reasons for his choices. I guess he won;t answer, so I won;t bother giving any advice.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: malG
3.4GHz Northwood... Which Intel LGA775 CPU (excluding EEs) is significantly faster than my current CPU?

None, but if you do decide to upgrade, I'll buy your 3.4GHz Northwood if the price is right.

 

[DarkKnight69]

You could always go with something new. the Dothan will own if you are a gameplayer!

 

[malG]

I use my PC mostly for trading (MetaStock 9.0) and business (Office XP). Occasionally I use it for image editing (Photoshop Elements) and playing games (GTA SA, BF2). I'm not overclocking it because stability is my primary concern (my livelihood at stake). I don't think I multitask a lot but I do have several windows of MetaStock open during trading hours.

I doubt dual core CPU is going to be beneficial for me since none of my programs is multi-threaded and I believe it would take years for business apps and games to be fully multi-threaded. I'm surprised that my 2 year old CPU is still up there with Intel latest...oh well, I guess I'll upgrade my monitors to Dell's 24" instead. Thanks.

 

[AkumaX]

Originally posted by: malG
I use my PC mostly for trading (MetaStock 9.0) and business (Office XP). Occasionally I use it for image editing (Photoshop Elements) and playing games (GTA SA, BF2). I'm not overclocking it because stability is my primary concern (my livelihood at stake). I don't think I multitask a lot but I do have several windows of MetaStock open during trading hours.

I doubt dual core CPU is going to be beneficial for me since none of my programs is multi-threaded and I believe it would take years for business apps and games to be fully multi-threaded. I'm surprised that my 2 year old CPU is still up there with Intel latest...oh well, I guess I'll upgrade my monitors to Dell's 24" instead. Thanks.

you bastard

out of curiosity, how much was the 3.4c when you bought it? NW's are awesome

 

[malG]

I bought my 3.4GHz Northwood the first week they were released and I paid about US $500. Are they worth more nowadays?

 

[Zebo]

X2's are the next "two year chip"

That's the only chip you can buy which is signifigantly faster than a 3.4C in every single benchmark.

 

[stevty2889]

I wouldn't bother "upgrading" to a prescott. It depends somewhat on what you do with your system, but you won't get a significant performance increase even with a 3.8ghz prescott. I have a 3.06ghz northwood, running at 3.45ghz, and it was actualy faster than the prescott at 3.82ghz in some things. The northwood was faster at audio encoding, file compression, and 3d rendering, while the prescott was a decent bit faster at video encoding, and and a marginal amount faster for gaming(in benchmarks at least, they are both fast enough that I couldn't notice much of a differance).

 

[AMDgood IntelBAD]

so what makes a cpu faster? the prescott's have such high frequencies but are they truly faster and why not?

 

[blckgrffn]

The prescotts got considerably longer pipelines than the northwoods, requiring greater freqencies for the same "throughput". Think of it as the difference between the P4s (northwoods, they scaled from 1.6 to 3.4 in like 1.5 years or so! Wow!) and the A64, except Intel did it to themselves In their defense, the prescott was evidently supposed to scale upwards of 4ghz, but the smaller process allowed more energy to be lost in the form of heat, they had to incorporate 64 bit adding more transistors, and they ran into problems running at such high frequencies, period. Evidently it does take electricity a little time to move a across a die even that small...

I think that they would have been more competitive just shrinking the Northwood die and incorporating 64bit and SSE3 into that design, but what do I know!

 

[malG]

Talking about going back to the future, I believe the P3 1.4GHz Tualatin was significantly faster than the P4 1.6 GHz Willamette. And I'm pretty sure the Dothan mobile CPUs are based on the P3 Tualatin. I can't wait for dual core Dothans for desktops

 

[blckgrffn]

Wait until Q1 of next year or so, then dual core Yonah (Dothan successor) will be your baby!

 

[AMDgood IntelBAD]

OOOOOHHHHH, q1, q2, q3, q4. 1st-4th quarters, i cant believe i didnt know that.
Why did they give the prescott such long pipelines?