Pentium 4 --> Pentium D?

[SlugForAButt]

Got a mate who only uses his PC for facebook, shopping & the like. He's just given it to me to have a look at because of a few issues.
I was horrified to see a 2.9Ghz Pentium 4 in a Foxconn RC4107MA-S2 under the bonnet and was wondering if a Pentium D will make much difference. I'm assuming it will make quite a difference but I'm not sure as I was an AMD boy at the time these were around.
Going to do this for him on the sly (cos he's always skint), so please no posts suggesting I should upgrade the system. I'm just trying to squeeze a little more out of his system and hoping it won't cost me much.

Cheers.

 

[Predicament]

A Pentium Dual Core E5200 would absolute kill his old Pentium 4, if you were able to get your hands on one of those.

Source:
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/66?vs=92

 

[eddyr]

Even though it is s775 it looks to be limited to netburst processors. The pentium D (P4) is dual core, not sure if it has HT? It will be a decent improvement for multitasking I expect, although it'l run hot too.

 

[Duke]

A P4-D will speed it up but as mentioned above they do run very hot. I'd imagine that a possible ram increase or hard disk replacement would give a bigger boost if able to spend a little on it.

 

[Admetos]

It's as eddyr says above, a Pentium D is two Pentium 4 Cores in same chip (no HT so 2 cores 2 threads). They ran very hot, plus side they are 64 bit.

Is your existing 2.9 P4 a hyber threaded version? If it's not hyper threaded you would see a fair gain from the Pentium D, but as said compared to a modern dual core still be very slow.

 

[pgi947]

Get a Pentium D 805, stock are 2.66ghz, but with a 20x multiplier and a decent air cooler you could churn upwards of 4ghz . It was the upgrade path I chose many moons ago, P4 3.06ghz HT to a 4ghz 805.

 

[SlugForAButt]

The existing P4 IS hyperthreaded and I have a spare Akasa 965 cooler kicking about from an old build which I could use.
Maybe it would be worth a shot, 2 true cores instead of HT?

Just need to find one now...

 

[opethdisciple]

I have used many P4's and Pentium D's, I cant say I saw much of a difference..

 

[Liam123]

My college has some pentium 4 PCs and some core 2 duo PCs and the speed increase over the 4s is amazing

 

[SlugForAButt]

Of course a C2D is much faster, but he'd then need another mobo. The Foxconn will only take P4 D max, so that's that really. Anyways, got an 820 on the way for next to nowt so we'll see.

 

[Indy500]

The other problem with Pentium Ds is the two cpu cores have to communicate with each other over the external FSB, which is already a bottleneck as it is.