p4 3.0e temps,

[hyenolie]

ive been reading some reviews and ive read some testimonies on newegg saying that the prescot chip runs at very high temps at idle, 4 people or so have already said that their recently bought chip runs at around 50 or so.

but the 3.0c has been said to do idle at 38, a lot cooler, can anyone explain this, or give their opinions, you see i was getting the northbridge but then since the prescot has 1mb cache, i said hell why not, but this temperature is really discouraging me from buying. some words of wisdom please.

 

[Asus]

Prescott is hot because of design issues (not .09 micron).
Basicly Prescott has some things that cause it's performance to be rather poor just so they can clock it higher. That was the goal.

But because it's poor performance they added some L2 cache (higher latency than the Northwood's) and some other things help it to remain even on many benchmarks. Don't look at that as a source for more performance at all. Get northwood even if it cost more...

Link
Notice Prescott (3.0E ghz, 3.2E ghz, 3.4E ghz....look for the E) vs Northwood.
The easiest one to spot is the Red bar, which is the Prescott 3.4ghz CPU and compare that with the other 3.4 cpus.

When Prescott is ahead...its by a point or two.
When Northwood is ahead...its by more than a few points.

 

[hyenolie]

thanks for the link asus, it helped a lot putting things into prospective,

i noticed the e and c chips at respective speeds have very little difference in score, and if the testimonies are true, ied rather stick with the C chip which runs at lower temps. tell me what you guys think. twice the cache runs hl2 a lot better? or not that much difference?

 

[blahblahblah]

Prescott is hot because of design issues (not .09 micron).
Basicly Prescott has some things that cause it's performance to be rather poor just so they can clock it higher. That was the goal.

But because it's poor performance they added some L2 cache (higher latency than the Northwood's) and some other things help it to remain even on many benchmarks. Don't look at that as a source for more performance at all. Get northwood even if it cost more...

Link
Notice Prescott (3.0E ghz, 3.2E ghz, 3.4E ghz....look for the E) vs Northwood.
The easiest one to spot is the Red bar, which is the Prescott 3.4ghz CPU and compare that with the other 3.4 cpus.

Don't confuse the poor guy.

Most of the articles mention heat disappation just to inform the overclockers about how much a new chip can be overclocked. Since Prescott has such a high load temperture, most overclockers frown on it (because they can't overclock as much). If you don't overclock temperture doesn't affect you performance wise.

The next biggest concern is getting rid of the heat that the prescott puts out. From my understanding of microchips and whatnot, running at 50c is not the worst thing in the world. It may shorten the life of the CPU at that temperture, but if you plan to upgrade within four years or so, you should be just fine.

Related to getting rid of heat is the noise of fans in your computer. The more heat your components generate, the more fans and cooling solutions you will have to use to make sure your components don't get to hot. The problem isn't with "how do I get rid of the heat" but "how much noise can I tolerate."

I would go with Northwood (like Asus) just because it puts out less heat, which means less case fans, which means less noise. But the choice is yours.

 

[blahblahblah]

thanks for the link asus, it helped a lot putting things into prospective,

i noticed the e and c chips at respective speeds have very little difference in score, and if the testimonies are true, ied rather stick with the C chip which runs at lower temps. tell me what you guys think. twice the cache runs hl2 a lot better? or not that much difference?

If the L2 cache isn't making much of a difference now, it probably won't make a difference when HL2 comes out.

 

[Asus]

The only thing about Prescott's heat that may be of consern is reports of it getting too hot and start to throttle the clock down. As long as you get rid of that heat...you won't run into that though.

1MB won't do anything that it doesn't do now.
In general more cache is good for small programs that may fit in the cache and run near CPU speed compared to going out to memory but if it's going out to memory anyway the larger higher latency memory is a penalty.

 

[hyenolie]

thanks for the help guys.