Reply 20 of 43, by .legaCy
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wrote:Honestly, I wouldn't use either. Any Core 2 Duo will run circles around both of these at half the power draw and you can get one […]
wrote:P4 521 HT Technology 2.8GHz. 1MB cache, 800MHz FSB
or
Pentium D 930 3.0GHz, 4MB cache, 800MHz FSBHonestly, I wouldn't use either. Any Core 2 Duo will run circles around both of these at half the power draw and you can get one for absolutely dirt cheap, like $5 or less. You can put together a very quiet C2D system with just a cheap $10 cooler, but for a Pentium 4 and especially Pentium D you will need either a beefy cooler or put up with obnoxious fan noise.
Also both of those CPUs are socket 775, so whatever motherboard you have for them will most likely also support at least some range of C2D CPUs. And if you don't have a board yet, it's trivially easy to get one that supports the entire C2D range. Just settle on a budget and desired features - if you don't want to overclock and can make do with 2 RAM slots and other basic connectivity, you can probably find a usable board for as little as $10. Or 2-3 times as much if you want something fancier for decent overclocking and lots of expansion options.
So really, unless you have some nostalgic reason to go with a Pentium 4/D, there is really no good reason to not go with a Core 2 Duo instead. It basically doesn't cost any extra and is much faster and especially power efficient that it's not even funny.
And as for needing a quad core for Windows XP, no, you really don't. There weren't even any quad core CPUs available until Vista was already out. XP was absolutely still primarily the era of single core computing, even dual cores barely showed up towards the end, a year or so before Vista. And then games took even longer to make use of even two cores. So unless you want to also run late 2000's games on your XP build, you really don't need more than two cores.
Agreed, i mean, when i got my C2D i had Vista installed, previous to that i used an Athlon XP (which is running Windows XP to this day).