I'd personally skip Preshott for a faster Northwood with HT, unless you actually want/need SSE3 for something.

Or go for one of those S775 865 chipset boards and a Cedar Mill.

Added pics to first post..

I found an old Asus board in my storage with a 2.8ghz Northwood SL6WJ cpu however I accidentally delidded it when removing heatsink due to old thermal paste and bent a few pins too.

I also picked up for $10 an XFX Geforce 6800 AGP card to replace the Radeon 9550 once I get it running.

Question I have does the Prescott have any advantage over the Northwood other than SSE3?
If it makes no difference as said then I'll try get the pins fixed on this cpu I delidded 🤣.

XFX Geforce 6800

Oops...

There really isn't that much difference between them. I would personally fix the pins and run the processor. The Northwood is a great core and it runs soooo much cooler than the Prescott cores.

The general consensus is Prescott (at least in its original, s478 incarnation) is about the same speed in most workloads as an equivalent Northwood... while pulling ~25% more power.

Also... lol. I'm surprised it didn't rip the CPU out of its socket, instead. A good tip is to twist the HSF first (if possible) to loosen the TIM, rather than just immediately yanking upward.

If for whatever reason you are intending to watch Youtube or other videos the larger cache and sse3 seem to benefit video playback alot. Honestly the Prescotts run fairly cool as long as you use a copper core HSF and good thermal paste.

Well did a bit more on it today, added 4x 1GB sticks of Geil CL1.5 DDR400 so hopefully performs well with that and get some tight timings (New to this, usually just install ram and hope for the best)

Cpu I've settled on and slotted in a 3.0Ghz SL7PM Prescott and a copper cooler as I broke the plastic retainer clip on the stock cooler anyway.
Will see how temps go and might modify an LGA775 cooler I have sitting there if it shows the temps they're renound for.

Installed the Geforce 6800 into it for now and see if sufficient enough, I also have a Radeon HD3850 sitting at backup failing this..

Going to pickup a cheap 4.3 aspect ratio monitor tomorrow hopefully, I only have wide-screen laying around which just doesn't add to the retro feel.

I wonder how can you bear with that AVC fan. I have the same HSF and I was forced to replace the fan with some Spire fan (of the same size) I had because the AVC was effectilvely sounding like a jetplane.

Shaping up to be a great build. Really like the case, btw. There's plenty of ventilation available for a p4 build. It was a good idea to replace that 9550, it is not a good performer as a directx 9 card. The original ATI 9500 outperformed it significantly. Also, another note about the prescotts is that they do have a lot of memory bandwidth compared to the northwoods. Without dual channel memory or a ddr2 chipset, this doesn't really come in to play though. The same architecture that gives the prescott it's bandwidth also increases its latency. That all being said, I don't think you'll feel any difference. I have the same 3.0E processor and used it for years as my main and got a lot of good fun out of it.

I have a roughly similar build running Win98 and XP
P4P800 End of Win98 Support Build

its a nice machine when you want to enable all the graphics features like AA, AF, etc, etc turned on.
Getting Win98 was a bit of battle though (one i cheated and purchased the rlow patch) so not sure I recommend it or not.