It's a great upgrade cpu if you have old 478 socket motherboard. It has lots of potential to overclock, particularly with fast memory. It runs a bit warm but stable. This cpu can extend the life of old pc with decent speed and performance. I run a multi-OS system, windows and ubuntu on this cpu.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
A lot faster than the Northwood 2.4 Ghz we were using. But this chip tends to get hot FAST. If you want to really lean on this chip, water or other exotic cooling will probably be required. Was able to clock it to 3.75Ghz at 1.4 Vcore, above this it got unstable, using Win 7 Pro. At this speed it rates a 4.5 in the Experience Center test, so not too bad for 11 year old tech! In retrospect it is easy to see why Intel went to the Duo-Core after the Prescott- they had just about run out of room to make the single-core tech run any faster! But now that these are available second-hand for not a lot of money, they make great "hobbyist" chips.
I purchased this cpu as a final upgrade to an old Dell machine that had had the motherboard replaced. Let me tell you now that this is a hot cpu! They run between 103 and 115 watts TDP. Using the best stock socket 478 cooler out there (you can identify it as it looks like a rectangular LGA 775 cooler with the swirling heat fins), the thing gets up into the 60s (celsius) under load. Can you use it in 2016? Sure, primarily if you have a light-weight operating system such as LXDE Linux which is built for older machines. The thing to keep in mind is that it will likely have to run maxed out for many tasks and heavy websites, like Youtube. However, lighter tasks (word processing, old games from its era, email) will work just like they should. Question: Should you get this Prescott or the Northwood version? Back in the day, the advice would have been solidly in Northwoods favor. It had a smaller L1 and L2 cache, but was usually quicker than and equivalently clocked Prescott. I would suggest that, assuming that your cooling is good, that the Prescott will actually come ahead now. Why? While I have no hard evidence (since no one compares 10+ year old cpus), I believe that modern applications will leverage the larger cache, improved Hyper-Threading, and SSE3 instructions present in the Prescott core that are missing in the Northwood (some Northwoods had Hyper-Threading, but it was improved in Prescott). It was documented that games which utilized large caches would preform better on a Prescott when it first came out. Since we have had large caches for a long time now, I must imagine that programs assume a larger cache and will squeeze as much performance out of it as possible. The only better option out there for socket 478 would be a Gallatin Extremem Edition which is a Northwood with an extra 2 megabytes of L3 cache added along with the existing L1 and L2. Overall, this is a good cpu but it does produce a great deal of heat. If heat is no problem for you, I say buy away!Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
for it's time this is what I'd consider one of the top dogs and yet its still relevant today and an excellent choice upgrade for older computer's that use the 478 socket, in a setup paired with 4x1GB pc3200 400mhz ram sticks it made a windows index experience rating of 4.4 and brought the ram up to a 5.0 on windows 7 32-bit.. this has been my experience with it in an HP pc from about 04-05, other's experience may vary, I actually got my old processor from a 3.7 to a 3.8 when I did a ram upgrade with it and do note that in my experience these components need to break in for each other so you may test it at first and like I at first saw a processor score of 3.8 again and a ram drop to 4.0 but after playing games, getting on youtube, or whatever I thought of to give it a break in it tested again at 4.4 and ram up to 5.0 and stayed consistant. Thank you for reading and I hope this review helps other consumers!Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
This is a great processor for its time. I installed it and ran several overclocking test and it performed perfectly. Chip speed is 3.4GHz and I was able to overclock it to 4.5GHz. without any problems. It even stayed nice and cool and all I use is a Thermaltake fluid filled heat sink and a tornado fan running at 5k rpm
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