Northwood C vs Wolfdale Comparison

[Aaron_H]

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.

 

[Aaron_H]

Aaron

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

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

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

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 )