I was looking at older Pentium 4 processors and I had a question about the Pentium 4 530 and 630 processors. They both have hyper-threading technology, a 3.0Ghz clock speed, a 800Mhz FSB, 90nm architecture, and a LGA775 socket. The only difference is that the 530 has a 1MB cache and the 630 has a 2MB cache.

Will there be a big difference in the speeds of these processors?

Thank you for your responses.

And please do not give me your opinions on AMD processors or Core 2 Duo processors.

There will be a difference, but I don't think it would be a very noticeable difference. If the 630 is only a few dollars more, then I would go with that. But otherwise, I don't think the extra performance is really enough to warrant paying more, especially since they are both slightly outdated.

^What he said. The cache makse almost no difference. Now if there was say one with a 1MB cache and one with a 4MB cache that may be different. But in your case they are almost equal in performance.

Are you sure about the 90nm being the same? I thought the 5xx and 8xx were both built on either the 130 or 90nm process, with the 6xx and 9xx being smaller. (either 90 or 65nm) Thats really the only difference between the 5xx and 6xx, or the 8xx and 9xx. (the 6xx and 9xx should have double the cache due to the smaller process.)

I think the other big difference is that the 6XX as EM64T support. I could be wrong though...the 5XX may support it as well.

They are equally old, trust me, its better to buy a newer mobo, and a cheap core 2 or x2, just put more memory om my hephews system today, 1 gb of ddr is more than 2 gb ddr2, so suporting old hardware is gonna be more pricey in the end and not at gratifying performance wise.

Unless you are getting that upgrade CPU for <$20, then I would just keep using the machine until you can buy a new one.

The 6XX Prescotts were in some tests slower than the 5XX Northwoods.

This was because the extra cache was not enough to help because Prescott had 31 pipeline stages while Northwood had 20.

^Hence why northwood was a decent chip for its time. Considering Conroe only has a 15? stage pipeline 20 stage is not that bad. But 31stage? thats just bad.

The 5xx series were Prescotts. The 6x0 series were Prescotts with 2mb cache and EIST. The 6x1 series were 65nm Cedarmills. There never was a Northwood CPU made for LGA 775. The closest that ever came was the very rare P4 3.46 GHz Extreme Edition built on the Gallatin core. The 5xx naming scheme was only used on the LGA775 cpus. All Prescott P4s for socket 478 were listed by GHz. The only slight exception to this rule was the Celeron D, where both the lga775 and socket 478 CPUs used a numbering system.

I have spoken.

Based off of this, then both the 5xx and 6xx are the same process? Probably 90nm. The northwoods were 130nm, and ceders were 65nm. Correct? I should probably just look this up.