Northwood (P4) versus Conroe E6700

[imported_Salamander]

I have a Pentium 4 Northwood processor (3.2 GHz) at the moment. I'm getting ready to build a Conroe using the E6700 processor. I'm interested in opinions on how much different the E6700 will be in terms of speed, heat, etc..

 

[Rike]

Off the cuff, I'd say . . .

1. Somewhat cooler, even thought it's two cores not one.

2. Maybe 40-50% faster and overall snappier, again because you have two cores.

 

[Aosh]

I'm looking to upgrade from Northwood to Conroe too..

Hmmm, Northwood was out around 3yrs ago. 3 years and only 40-50% improvement??

 

[Sphexi]

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&model1=461&model2=431&chart=166


No Northwoods on there, but I selected a Prescott 3200/200, and the E6700, and so far the 6 different tests I've selected, it's been a 5x improvement with the E6700.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Click the CPU/Chipset tab. link for the tabdicapped

An E6300 is slightly faster than a dual-core P4 3.6 GHz.

It's more than twice as fast as a single-core 3.2 GHz, but only if you load up both cores with multiple applications running at once, or run the rare application that parallelizes well enough to saturate mutliple cores.

 

[Roguestar]

And don't forget to mention they overclock really, really easily, really well. See my sig.

 

[shabby]

If you do a lot of gaming you will see a huge increase, i just went from a 3.2ghz p4 to a... well 3.2ghz overclocked conroe. The difference in games is huge, the p4 was a huge bottleneck. Windows is a lot snappier too.

 

[imported_Salamander]

If I don't overclock the E6700 (I haven't overclocked my P4 Northwood), will I see faster bootup times and faster signle applications? I expect the bigger difference will show up when I doing video editing and other processor intensive tasks, but I'd like to see some speed increase in everday use as well.

 

[CurseTheSky]

Yes, you will.

However, it's not just the processor that will increase your speed. With the new processor, you will most likely need a new motherboard (better chipset), new memory (DDR2 versus DDR), a new graphics card (PCI-E), and possibly new hard drives (SATA). All of these put together will increase the speed of your system ten fold.

However, if it was possible to just stick the Core 2 Duo in your current system, you would still see a huge performance gain over the old Northwood. Though you may be only using single applications, dual cores help a ton. How many times have you played a game, and had to open up a browser really quick? Keep in mind that your computer also has many background applications that eat up processor resources as well.

 

[SuperNaruto]

Let me know when you wanna sell that 3.2.. everywhere is out of the 3.4s.. next best one is 3.2