Help me decide between Northwood and Prescott

[03DSGSnake]

I'm currently buidling a new system with an

Aspire Turbo X-Dreamer II case
Enermax Noisetaker 425 (420 watt)

The new parts needed are
ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe mobo
1 gig Kingston Hyper-X PC4000

And a 3.2Ghz P4, socket 478, but I'm having trouble deciding between the Prescott and the Northwood cores.

The Northwood runs cooler and has 512k cache, the Prescott runs hotter, is the newer model, and has 1mb cache.

I've seen a few benchmarks comparing them but they seem to perform similar, so which route should I take?

I play games and run different apps (student), nothing like hardcore video crunching or anything but I always want to be flexible done the line.

Any input would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[Midknyte]

Northwood runs much cooler and beats the Prescott in many benchmarks. Prescotts have a longer pipeline (31 vs 20 on northwood), which slows it down a bit.

[03DSGSnake]

Well I guess I still have a choice since I'm going with a 875 chipset mobo so I can either get the Northwood or Prescott since I think only Prescotts are in the new 775 socket.

The deciding factor is I just dropped a few hundred on a GeForce6800 AGP board and that wont work with a PCI Express chipset..

[lptech]

03DSGSnake-

Midknyte is correct to point out that Prescott's larger pipeline might slow down things alot more than the Northwood's smaller pipeline. The larger cache is the only advantage the Prescott has but that is negated by the fact the larger pipeline it has would also slow the processor down! Remember that in the example of the AMD Athlong XP+, they have an optimum amount of piplelines and therefore able to execute and process more efficiently! That is why they can do more per cycle compared to Intel's P4 CPUs.

Just because the specs sound good, it doesn't necessarily mean that it is better overall! Also remember that the Prescott's generate more heat and therefore draw more power. I read somewhere that it draws around 100 watts when run full throttle. This also means that your PSU choice is very critical as a component, since it powers up everything and any deficiency in the PSU will definitely show up as anomalies.

Here's a link that should be quite informative:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040517/index.html

I think that this should be a good guide to base your decision making. Good luck!

LPTECH

[03DSGSnake]

Lptech,

I was reading that article yesterday at work. They came out pretty dead even. The charts shows the Prescott uses less voltage than the Northwood?

I guess the Northwood hit its end at 3.4, and the Prescotts will be made faster eventually. I'm upgrading from a 2.0 so a 3.2 or 3.4 would be a huge upgrade now vs. waiting for the faster Prescotts. I can always upgrade later if they keep making 478s.

As far as the maximum speed it doesnt make a difference to me as this is my first system build, any overclocking would be done "automatically" through the ASUS BIOS.

Lastly, would you recommend PC3200 or PC4000? I'm looking at getting 1gig of Kingston HyperX in either the 3200 or 4000 but am stuck on that decision too.

Thanks

[Midknyte]

they aren't going to be extending the 478s too much. maybe a 3.6, but don't hold your breath. the higher prescotts will be 775 for sure.

The prices should be dropping soon, so you could get a 3.4 at a decent price (sub $300 I think).

Are you going to overclock? if not, then lower latency pc3200 would be better. if you want to overclok, then pc4000 would basically guarantee that the ram would run up to 250mhz. no promises on the cpu, though. pc4000 stuff tends to be of higher latency, so running it at pc3200 speeds would be slower.

[03DSGSnake]

I read that NewEgg supposedly is lowering the prices on P4s on the 22nd but havent seen anything yet.

No point in me going with a 775 socket since I want to stick with the 875 chipset.

I'm only going to overclock to whatever small percentage can be done through the BIOS on the ASUS board (more than likely not right away), a 3.2 or 3.4 with 1gig will be fast enough for me for a while before I need to start tinkering with it.

So the 3200 would be best?

[lptech]

03DSGSnake-

If you're going to stick with the 875 chipset and not overclock to extreme, then the PC3200 memory should suffice. I agree with what Midknyte is saying in that Intel would probably switch over to the 775 configuration on their future CPUs and that any Prescott CPUs sold today would be old news in a few months.

LPTECH

[Midknyte]

you could go either way. pc3200 would be fine at stock speeds, but you might have to loosen the timings to get it to overclock faster. PC4000 will run at lower latencies when run at pc3200 speeds, but you have to manually tighten the timings.

bottomline, if you don't want to mess with timings ( or don't know how) and you aren't going to OC much, go with CAS2 PC3200.

This is a generalized statement because different manufacturer's have different tolerances.