Intel

For Intel you have the Celeron, Pentium 4 series, which include the 500, 600 series. The older P4s, which are Socket478 should be avoided when building a new system. There is nothing wrong with them, but they are outdated and work with very few PCI-E boards. There are the P4 EEs (Extreme Edition) too; they are Intel's top CPUs. These are very expensive and not worth the money unless you like to waste it on little tiny bits of performance increase.

Also there is the mobile Pentium M to consider for desktops. You can get an adapter (ASUS CT-479) and run the Pentium M on the older S478 boards. So there is still some hope for the Socket 478, and there are some boards with PCI-E that will support these bad boys. These perform really well at gaming, when overclocked, but are not much good at other stuff compared to the Athlon 64. If you don't want to overclock/spend hours tweaking and fiddling with your system, you should stay away from these.

Celerons, stay away from them too unless you only check emails and surf the web, or maybe even do some extreme Solitaire playing. Pentium D's are Intel Dual Core solution and are excellent for multitasking. But there is no advantage in gaming yet. Celeron M is based on the Dothan core, however may provide a viable option for the Socket 479 on the budget people. It is a Dothan core with 1 MB cache instead of 2 MB and performs very nicely, while keeping power consumption down. The new Yohan mobile core will replace the Dothan slowly.

Xeons are usually server/workstation processors, and are not your every day choice, but they still can be used for a home PC. They can be quite the little powerhouses. When it comes to the Xeons there are two cores that are the main type: "Nocona", and "Irwindale". Again, the difference is cache. These are based on the P4 Prescott, and the main difference to a regular P4 is that the Xeon has Symmetric Multi Processing (SMP). SMP is basically a fancy way of saying multiple processors.

The Prestonia is a Northwood based processor, and is outdated, so you would go with the newer generation like the Nocona and Irwindale. The downside of Xeons at the moment is boards are pricey for PCI-E support and are not really offering many overclocking options. The only cheaper boards are for AGP, which is not worth getting when buying a new computer.

The P4 600 series are the newer versions of the 500 and have 2MB of Level 2 cache and support 64 Bit (EM64T). These all use the new socket LGA775, which has all the new features so you can't go wrong. The 6X1 are the new version of the 600 series, and use the new 65nm process, these are the Cedar Mill cores. Now for a minimum processor for gaming, at least 3.2 GHz. Other wise youe are going to bottleneck, and waste money on buying a really fast graphics card. These are your Intel options.

Intel's HT technology (Hyper Threading) is a multitasking solution, and is almost standard on all their CPUs. It doubles certain parts of the CPUs die so it can handle more threads at one time. It will show up in Windows as two CPUs, but it is not as effective as two. It does help with multitasking though compared to a non-HT enabled CPU.


An Intel Prescott Core.