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Ive never heard of prescott, and im simply wondering what the difference is over the average p4. I see that they are 90nm...which is smaller than the norm...im just wondering if its worth it to buy this. Is it good for overclocking? What are the benefits of this core over the northwood ones? Thanks

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They are the successor to Northwood, but as of now it is NOT better than northwood. They shrunk the process down (130nm to 90nm), increased the L2 cache to 1mb, and added SSE3 instruction sets (all of those should help make the processor faster). But here's the catch: They also increased the pipeline from 20 stages to 30 stages, which makes it run outrageously hot and less effecient than northwood. A prescott will be slower at the same clock speeds than a northwood. The longer pipe does theoretically make the chip capable of higher clock speeds, but they run so hot that it isn't really practical to do so.

 

They DO oc like crazy, but that's only if you can control their crazy amounts of heat. And although the oc like crazy, they are still slower clock for clock than a northwood. I do believe Nuclear did the benches once and a prescott at 4ghz is about as fast as a Northwood at 3.75ghz or so.

Edited by Eva_Unit_0

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i see i see, i plan on getting a watercooling rig though, so maybe this is the processor for me? I was going to get the zalman reserator (fanless setup). Will this be sufficiant? i hear its not too great at getting extremely low temps...

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A prescott will be slower at the same clock speeds than a northwood

 

As I understand it, the faster the chips go, the less Northwood pulls ahead. At some point they expect Prescott to actually be faster, clock-for-clock.

 

More info and direct comparisons on Tomshardware.com

 

I'm happy with my Prescott at 3.5GHz on air, but have also heard that the Zalman water setup is less-effective than a good air setup. I wouldn't expect it to be that good with Prescott, which puts out a LOT of heat.

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it shouldnt be horribly less effective, after all it is water. I saw some temperatures of 28.5degrees (unless i was confused), for a northwood. It is also quite appealing that it is absolutely silent.

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As I understand it, the faster the chips go, the less Northwood pulls ahead. At some point they expect Prescott to actually be faster, clock-for-clock.

 

More info and direct comparisons on Tomshardware.com

 

I'm happy with my Prescott at 3.5GHz on air, but have also heard that the Zalman water setup is less-effective than a good air setup. I wouldn't expect it to be that good with Prescott, which puts out a LOT of heat.

Yes, that is true....the longer pipe will perform very well at high clock speeds and eventually be better than a northwood....that is still pretty far off, though. Prescott needs to get well above 4ghz before the pipe will really get moving, and as of now the only way I've seen a prescott hit 4ghz is on Phase-change cooling. (nuclear's modded Mach II). That's just not practical now.

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Alrihgt, so all in all....with a watercooling setup such as the zalman reserator, will i be able to control the prescott to levels of overclocking? or if i want to overclock should i get the northwood ?

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either a custom one (theres LOTS of topics about custom made right now) or waita little onger and get teh flowmaster xt from DTEK, right now there out of resiviours and dont know when they are getting htem back in stock

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