Pentium 4HT 3.0 or Pentium D 2.8

[Flying-Q]

Morning crew,

I'm rebuilding two old machines to make one:

I have a choice of a hyperthreaded northwood C1 stepping P4 running at 3.0 stock and a non-hyperthreaded prescott at 2.8 stock (both socket 478).

Assuming no overclock on this build, which would be the better chip to go with? Also of note, the P4D came with a Dell proprietary cooler which is now broken so I have to use the one from the northwood regardless.

I'm leaning towards the P4HT because of HT, core clock and lower heat.

Any thoughts?

Q

 

[ScrewySqrl]

I'd be tempted toward the P4D because 2 real cores are better than HT.

 

[outlw6669]

From the two that you have, I would defiantly choose the Northwood.
While the A-Series Prescott is technically more 'advanced' than the Northwood, its overall performance is similar (some programs are faster due to the larger cache and SSE3 support, others are slower due to the longer pipeline).
Add to that the lack of Hyper-Threading and a higher TDP (despite it being 90nm vs 130nm for the Northwood) makes the Prescott line a flop.

As an additional note, the Prescott is not a Pentium D processor.
The Pentium Ds are all LGA775 dual core parts and are significantly better than any single core Pentium 4.

 

[pepe2907]

+1 to Pentium D

outlw6669 you say Pentium D has a longer pipeline as P4 Northwood? As much as I remember P4 Northwood with it's netburst architecture /they both are/ was kind of famous for it's very long pipeline. Higher TDP comes from the double cores - it's even two phisical cristals as I remember - actually two discrete processors in one "hull".
As a side note - where somebody exactly mentioned Prescott?
Ah, and Prescott wasn't only used in Pentium D as much as I can remember...

 

[outlw6669]

There are no Pentium Ds here, only a PPGA478 Northwood Pentium 4 745 and a PPGA478 Prescott 'Pentium 4 2.8GHz' (possibly a 'Pentium 4 2.8A GHz' if it has the full 1MB L2 cache).

The Prescott was a major rework of the Northwood that took the process form 130nm to 90nm, doubled the L2 cache to 1MB and added a few stages to the pipeline.
According to Wikipedia, the Northwood P4 HT 3GHz has a TDP of 81.9W vs a TDP of 89W for both the Prescott 2.8GHz and Prescott 2.8A GHz CPUs.

The Pentium D on the other hand, exclusively for the LGA775 platform, is two Prescott (earlier Smithfield 90nm parts) or Ceader Mill (later Presler 65nm parts; identical to the Prescott 2M core just shrunk to 65nm) dies in a single package.
These where significantly hotter due to, as you stated, having two extremely hot cores stuffed into a single package.
So hot indeed that all but the Extreme Editions had to disable Hyper-Threading to keep the processor within thermal specifications.
The Pentium D would match exactly its Pentium 4 counterpart in single threaded performance.

 

[Flying-Q]

From the two that you have, I would defiantly choose the Northwood.
While the A-Series Prescott is technically more 'advanced' than the Northwood, its overall performance is similar (some programs are faster due to the larger cache and SSE3 support, others are slower due to the longer pipeline).
Add to that the lack of Hyper-Threading and a higher TDP (despite it being 90nm vs 130nm for the Northwood) makes the Prescott line a flop.

As an additional note, the Prescott is not a Pentium D processor.
The Pentium Ds are all LGA775 dual core parts and are significantly better than any single core Pentium 4.

Thankyou outlw6669, im going with the Northwood as you have confirmed my suspicions. I had forgotten the 'D' was LGA775 only so this prescott is an 'A'.

Cheers

Q

 

[outlw6669]

No problem, best luck with the rebuild!

 

[Flying-Q]

Best answer selected by Flying-Q.