Intel Pentium 4 upgrade

[vvmm]

I had an Intel Pentium 4 Northwood @ 2.8GHz HT 512KB cache and I wanted to upgrade the system with the fastest compatible processor, because videos did not play smoothly. So I decided to buy an Intel Pentium 4 Prescott @ 3.4GHz HT 1MB cache. Surprisingly, the video quality didn't improve. Furthermore my Windows Experience Index for the Northwood was 3.3 and now, for the Prescott, I have only 2.8???? What is the problem? Is the 3.4GHz Prescott slower than the 2.8GHz Northwood?
Do I have to return the processor?

 

[king smp]

Northwoods were know to run cooler than Prescotts but the Prescott should have given you a better WEI score
make sure all unnecessary programs and processes are turned off while running WEI

with that said
your video playing will be more dependent on a video card than the CPU
getting a decent video card would definitley help the video
I ran a Dual Xeon Pentium 4 based system for years and using a Nvidia 7600GS AGP card really helped with the video

the only problem is that your system is more than likely AGP and those cards are expensive to buy from online now

and to be honest investing money into your system is just not worthwhile
not to be mean

so if Craigslist is available for you or some other used option then please buy the card used

if you need help open up a thread in the Graphics forum and we can help you figure out what video card (GPU) you need

also be warned there are some immature members on here who will pick on you for having an older system sorry to say
so just ignore them

you can also private message me by clicking on my avatar picture and send me the link to the Graphics thread so I can help

first make sure what kind of video slot you have
either PCI,AGP or PCIe
if your not sure list your motherboard (mobo) model number and I can help

 

[vvmm]

My video card is Nvidia 7600GS AGP, surprisingly, like yours, with a WEI score of 4.6. When i watch a movie, the processor was and is performing at 100% and since it had the lowest mark in WEI, i had decided to change it. But, now, is the new processor faster than the older one? (is WEI wrong?) Or it is slower? i do not see any improvement on the video playback quality.
p.s: Before changing the processor I tried to overclock the Northwood at 3.01GHz, and that solved my playback issue and it gave me also a WEI of 4.1

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

WEI is most likely wrong but there isn't as much of a performance advantage as the clock speed would seem to lead you to believe between the Northwood Intel® Pentium® 4 processor and the Prescott Intel Pentium 4 processor. The real problem is that the Prescott just didnt yeild much of an improvement in performance. Heck moving up to a Intel Core™ 2 Duo that is running at 2.13GHz can out performance an Intel Pentium 4 that runs much faster.

Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team