• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Northwood C vs Wolfdale Comparison

Aaron_H

Aaron_H

Aaron_H

Associate
Joined
18 Aug 2007
Posts
16
I've stayed way away from hardware for a long long while now. So forgive this pretty stupid question.

I know that the new Wolfdale processors would pretty much own any of the older ones...
But just out of interest (I'm doing a new build soon); how much CPU performance would be gained by moving from an old Northwood D Pentium 4 3.2GHz to the new 3GHz Wolfdale CPUs?

I've read some people say that a 2GHz C2D would give greater performance than the old 3.2Ghz processors (when Intel still believed the Megahertz myth) due to the faster FSB and more cores (even if they are not completely used right now).

Thanks for any insight you can give. :)
 
It would depend on what you are doing with the PC - gaming, Photoshop, encoding etc.

But I think going from a Northwood to a Wolfdale would be like night and day as long as you have current tech hardware to go with the Wolfdale CPU (hard disk, video card etc).
 
PCZ said:
I do
Wind your neck in
Click to expand...

CPU a Northwood 3.2 with HT or a P4 D dual core... Whats the difference they are both slow cpu's by todays standards.

Why does caring about this make any diffrence to the OP?

The wolfdale 8400 makes them chips obsolete in todays arena.
 
PCZ said:
Aaron

Is your CPU a Northwood 3.2 with HT or a P4 D dual core ?
Not clear from your description.
Click to expand...


A 3.2GHz with HT. It's not one of the dual core ones. :P


Duke said:
THG don't have the E8xxx series on their CPU chart yet, but the 6550 and similar will give a rough indication of comparision from the P4s to the Core 2 Duos.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/processors/synthetic-sisoft-sandra-xi-cpu,329.html
Click to expand...

Thanks for that. It seems the E6550 beats the old 3.2's by quite a big margin, which can only be bigger when compared to the my version that's so old it isnt even on there.

There was no doubt I was going to upgrade to the newer chips. I just wondered how much better these new chips actually were.

Now it's just the old E8400 vs Q6600 debate to take into consideration when buying a new chip, but I won't start that one (I'll just get the 8400, because by the time quad core is needed better CPUs will be on the market :))
 
Last edited:
I still run a D940 @ 4.0ghz. With an ATI 3850, Raid0 drives and 2Gb DDR2 this machine runs most games 1900x1200 with very good gameplay (with the obvious exceptions like Crysis). I recently tried a E6600 @ 3.2Ghz with the ATI3850 and it only added another 10-15% to the framerates. Whilst this is a good improvement, it's not as massive as it should be according to certain benchmarks.
 
Aaron_H said:
I've read some people say that a 2GHz C2D would give greater performance than the old 3.2Ghz processors (when Intel still believed the Megahertz myth) due to the faster FSB and more cores (even if they are not completely used right now).

Thanks for any insight you can give. :)
Click to expand...

Actually it has very little to do with either the number of cores, or the FSB speed. Even the 800mhz FSB E4x00 series C2D's perform extremely well compared to the older Pentium IV range.

If you consider just a single core from a C2D, it will on average execute 4 instructions on every clock tick (its a 4 issue core). The P4 was theoretically a 3 issue core, however due to inefficient design, with most software it rarely exceeded 2 instructions per clock tick.

So, regardless of FSB speed, the Core 2 Duo range, a single core is virtually twice as fast as a P4 core, due purely to the good efficient design of the Core 2 Duo design.

The new wolfdale core is slightly faster than the conroe/allendale cores, but its nothing like the difference between conroe and northwood.

Going from a 3.2Ghz P4, to a 2.66Ghz E6700 in 2006 was a huge leap,performance of number crunching applications such as video processing, image manipulation all improved greatly, even though at the time very few applications made much use of the second core. More and more apps are starting to make use of the additional cores, so performance keeps improving.

If like GRiDlock your into high resolution gaming, then you'll be more likely to hit GPU bottlenecks than CPU ones, although it varies on what games you like. Games with a lot of AI, (such as real time strategy games) generally work the cpu harder than first person shooters which rely more heavily on fancy graphics. (A geforce 8800GTX would likely be a better choice for 1920x1200 gaming)

Bottom line, Core 2 Duos, and Quads are great chips, and leave P4's in the dust.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom