Upgrade from a P4-640 to a P Extreme 840

[Guest]

I have a P4-640 (3.2E GHz, 800 FSB, L2:2MB, EM64T, HT) on an old Asus P5ND2-Sli Deluxe mobo. The best cpu it can support is the
Pentium Extreme Ed-840 (3.2 GHz, 800 FSB, revB0), which are under $150 these days.

Is there a considerable performance difference between them? Does anyone think it would be a decent upgrade or a waste of money?

[Thandor]

Waste of money. Sell the current motherboard/CPU (and maybe RAM) and get a new board and budget CPU instead . Then you'll have new upgrade possibilities and a better CPU. The performance of the Pentium D is not that good so you can compare it to a low-budget Core 2 Duo or an AMD Athlon64 X2 (check out benchmarks!). Also, the Pentium eXtreme Edition (=Pentium D) 840 is quite a 'heavy' processor when it comes to energy consumption. This will not only be seen on your bills, i've seen cases in which the CPU destroyed the board after a while of (heavy) stresstesting.

And about performance difference: there is difference between the CPU's but when it comes to single-threaded performance they will not differ much. So using Word processors (and such) will run practically almost as good on the Pentium 4 as on the Pentium eXtreme Editon .

[Guest]

A new board it is. Thanks for your time and wisdom.