PD vs. Core 2 Duo

[o00JONESY00o]

Hey I was wondering what the main differences are between PD and Core 2 Duos. I am wondering if a 3.4Ghz PD would be more beneficial for gaming than an E6600, it seems like it would because it has a faster speed but what would be the downside of it compared to an E6600?

[blue60007]

The clock speed isn't the deciding factor anymore these days. The Core 2 Duo architecture is much much more efficient than the Pentium 4/D's. The Core 2's do much more per clock cycle than before. There also is more L2 cache and it's shared directly between the cores (PD's cores have to go over the FSB to access the other core's cache). Just to name a few changes...

Also C2D's use a fraction of the power (and put out less heat) of the Pentium D's. Another benefit of the more efficient architecture.

You can compare for yourself here.

[o00JONESY00o]

thank you very much. i've been wanting to know the difference ever since core 2 duos came out

[Cricket]

If you were to do some research into the old Netburst architecture of the Pentium 4's you'd find that although the speed of the processor seemed high, they were actually not very good performing processors (when compared to the older PIII architecture or the newer AMD and Intel C2D processors). So yeah, speed isn't everything now.

Cricket