Difference between p4-3.06Ghz 533Mhz and p4-2.8Ghz 800Mhz

[CPUs-Nooooob]

Since I have no clue about CPUs except a bit about their frequencies (something like: The higher the better, right?) and I have both of these p4 chips (3.06Ghz 533Mhz(FSB?) and p4-2.8Ghz 800Mhz(FSB?)).

Can anyone here please explain to me the advantages/disadvantages of each of these intel CPU over the other and which one in your opinion is better to be used?

[Thandor]

First of all: higher doesn't always mean better . A PC has lot's of components and every has various properties.

In your case it's not sure which CPU you have as both the Pentium 4 3.06/533 and Pentium 4 2.8/800 are available with a Northwood and Prescott core. The Prescott core is newer, is made on 90nm rather than 130nm, has some improvements and more L2-cache but it isn't always faster. It depends on the application that is being run but in the long run the performance is pretty much the same.

Lately I have been benchmarking a lot and also tested your type of CPU's (but with Prescott core, not with Northwood) and you can find the results here: thandor.net - Intel Pentium 4 524 (3.06 GHz). The red bar is the 3.06 and the grey bar shows the results of the 2.8GHz.

To get into the results: see how the Pentium 4 2.66/533 (Northwood; 512KB L2-cache) is faster than the 3.06/533 (Prescott; 1MB L2-cache). The Northwood CPU's tend to run better with Cinebench as the Pentium 4 3.0C (Northwood; 512KB) is faster than the Pentium 4 3.0E (Prescott; 1MB L2-cache). When you scroll down you will see other benchmarks indicating that the 3.06 is sometimes faster, but sometimes not.

Overall I would prefer the 2.8GHz 'Northwood' (as it will run cooler as well) over the 3.06GHz 'Prescott'. The other CPU's ... it depends on the application .

[CPUs-Nooooob]

Thanks for being so quick and responsive!

Now.. in order to get to the bottom of things, how can I find out if a cpu is either Northwood or Prescott, while it is unplugged?

The info I can read on it says:
Pentium 4
2.8ghz/512/800
SL6Z5 Costa Rica
3446A249
but that's it.

The other cpu is installed and AIDA32 gives the following info on it:
Pentium 4HT, 3066 Mhz
Northwood Hyperthreading
CPU Stepping C1
L1 Trace 12K
L1 Data 8 KB
L2 512 KB (On-Die, ATC, Full-Speed)

Thanks again!

[JAC]

[CPUs-Nooooob]

So, I think we have established some facts about the two CPUs, which show the following properties:

Type:-------------------------Pentium 4---------------------Pentium 4
Frequency (GHz)------------2.8-----------------------------3.06
Bus speed (MHz)------------800----------------------------533
Clock multiplier--------------14------------------------------23
L2 cache size (KB)----------512----------------------------512
Processor core--------------Northwood-------------------Northwood
CPUID-------------------------0F25h-------------------------0F27h
Core stepping---------------M0-----------------------------C1
Case temperature (°C)----72-----------------------------69
Features--------------------Both have Hyper-Threading technology

My initial conclusion would be that the only 2 differences between the two (which may affect their performance) would be their frequency (with the 3.06 being the faster one) and their FSB (with the other one having the advantage with 800Mhz)

So people, in your opinion, which of the two components (Frequency and Bus speed) would have a more significant effect on their performance in this case? Giving one of the two an obvious advantage (if any actual advantage exists of course...)

[Thandor]

Well, it really depends on the applications that you use. The differences are marginal so in the end it possible that you won't even notice a difference in general Windows use .

As you have both CPU's, why not give both a try to compare? If you are into overclocking you can try both CPU's as well. Both will probably have a margin left but with the 3.06GHz model you don't have to overclock the chipset (apart from latencies, dividers that come into play) because it's lower than it's maximal official frequency. That is assuming you have an 200MHz (QDR800) capable chipset.