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Core2Duo vs. Pentium D?

hunterjwizzard said:
The other day I got my hands on a microATX socket775 motherboard which I'm planning to turn into another XP rig. As is my pattern, I immediately sat down to max the board out with whatever spare parts I had lying around. It came with a 2ghz Core2Duo, and the only faster LGA775 CPU in my collection is an Intel SL94R, a 3.0ghz dual-core Pentium D.

Is this really any better than the Duo I'd be replacing?
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As has already been said, you're better off with the Core2Duo.

LGA775 in this timeframe got really weird, though; it depended both upon chipset and BIOS as to which specific LGA775 CPUs will work.

Have an LGA775 PICMIG industrial PC here; just put a NiB IEI ROCKY-6614 card in it, which is SiS 661-chipset, and it will do Celeron Ds but only single core Pentium 4's. Go up to Intel 945 and you get Core2Duo, but support is BIOS dependent.

Looking at the Dell Optiplex generations, as another example, GX620 will do Pentium D but not C2D or Pentium Dual core; Optiplex 745 will do those (uo throygh Cire 2 Quad, got a 6600 in one), and it's still LGA775. Just a different chipset and BIOS.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
The joke being that making any living creature use Windows 11 is inhumane. Let alone poor kids. Those kids have it bad enough without being subjected to Windows 11!
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Oh, ok, sorry. Eclipse brain today, I guess, it went over my head.....

If I had by druthers they would all be Debian 12, but we aren't able to do that yet....
 
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lowen said:
As has already been said, you're better off with the Core2Duo.

LGA775 in this timeframe got really weird, though; it depended both upon chipset and BIOS as to which specific LGA775 CPUs will work.

Have an LGA775 PICMIG industrial PC here; just put a NiB IEI ROCKY-6614 card in it, which is SiS 661-chipset, and it will do Celeron Ds but only single core Pentium 4's. Go up to Intel 945 and you get Core2Duo, but support is BIOS dependent.

Looking at the Dell Optiplex generations, as another example, GX620 will do Pentium D but not C2D or Pentium Dual core; Optiplex 745 will do those (uo throygh Cire 2 Quad, got a 6600 in one), and it's still LGA775. Just a different chipset and BIOS.
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The LGA775/771 is a weird era. Funnily enough I never owned a core2duo at the time(must have been during my AMD phase) but now they've become one of my favorite obsolete CPUs. Really wish I could get my hands on a good dual 771 that fits in ATX not E-ATX, but that is a dream for the future.
 
This motherboard I found occupies a particularly interesting space, in that it has a floppy disk controller but not IDE ports. I've seen a lot of boards with only 1 IDE & Floppy or 1 IDE and no floppy, but this is new.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
This motherboard I found occupies a particularly interesting space, in that it has a floppy disk controller but not IDE ports. I've seen a lot of boards with only 1 IDE & Floppy or 1 IDE and no floppy, but this is new.
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In the garage I have a couple of Q6600 desktops (Core2Quad, king of the LGA775s!), now I'm wondering if they had parallel IDE ports? (They have real floppy drives, it was a requirement of the office environment they came from. Been forever since I was last inside one, they were the kids' computers until I retired them in favor of Haswell-era hand-me-downs.) Having just the one parallel IDE port (mostly intended to host the optical drive) did certainly stick around for a while after SATA pretty much eliminated the need for it for a hard drive.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
In the garage I have a couple of Q6600 desktops (Core2Quad, king of the LGA775s!), now I'm wondering if they had parallel IDE ports? (They have real floppy drives, it was a requirement of the office environment they came from. Been forever since I was last inside one, they were the kids' computers until I retired them in favor of Haswell-era hand-me-downs.) Having just the one parallel IDE port (mostly intended to host the optical drive) did certainly stick around for a while after SATA pretty much eliminated the need for it for a hard drive.
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My current plan is to pick up a core2quad to upgrade my beastly UltimateX machine and use the handmedown CPU for this board. We shall see how that all pans out, since Core2Duos are so very much cheaer.
 
Gotta admit, I can’t imagine paying money for any of this, given even those mighty Q6600s will get their butts handed to them by the CPUs in Chromebooks.
 
I remember about 10 years ago I used to pull all the pentium D cpus from the machines they were throwing away in droves. i was selling the single cpu for about $50.00 at the time. I sold dozens and dozens of them. Seems lots of other people liked the cpu as well. I personally only like the 3.4ghz variant. Go big or go home.

I doubt I even have a single one left. I remember the machines we had them in too. HP DC7700 ultra slim desktop (last model before they actually became ultraslim). It was a very decent little slab of a computer. I ran linux on them all cranked out and they impressed. (pentium 4's on the other hand.. just run a high end pentium III any day)
 
Replacing a Prescott Celeron with a Ceder Mill Pentium D not only improved performance nicely but the power savings probably paid for the cost of the replacement quickly. I am not sure how many users had a good Pentium 4 motherboard that would not accept Core2 chips. Buying a new Core2 system would have been a marginal gain; waiting for DDR3 and the resultant larger memory space made more sense.
 
Pentium D's were LGA 775 and anybody with a brain would swap them out for a cooler running and faster Core 2 chip.

I can see why somebody ages ago would have wanted a dual core Pentium D to replace a LGA 775 Pentium 4 BEFORE C2D were out and cheap. One persons junk is another persons upgrade.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Gotta admit, I can’t imagine paying money for any of this, given even those mighty Q6600s will get their butts handed to them by the CPUs in Chromebooks.
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Well, it might be because you cannot take the CPU out of a chromebook, install it on a motherboard, and run windows on it. Kind of an apple and spark plugs comparison, there. Both useful items but hardly interchangeable :p
 
I have a pristine Intel mobo kit with the D and it's simply runs too hot. It's been setting on the shelf for years. I would definitely recommend Core 2.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Well, it might be because you cannot take the CPU out of a chromebook, install it on a motherboard, and run windows on it. Kind of an apple and spark plugs comparison, there. Both useful items but hardly interchangeable :p
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Oh sure, it's totally a me problem here; I guess on some purely intellectual level I can *kind* of understand how it would be *possible* for someone to care so much about the differences between the various versions of Windows that have, well, existed, since the turn of the century, but from an enthusiasm standpoint... nope, that's totally not my circus, nor my monkeys. Maybe I'll feel differently when the 30 year nostalgia cycle finally kicks in; I still have a year before I need to start caring about Windows 95. ;)

hunterjwizzard said:
My current plan is to pick up a core2quad to upgrade my beastly UltimateX machine and use the handmedown CPU for this board. We shall see how that all pans out, since Core2Duos are so very much cheaer.
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FWIW, eBay is claiming I can get a Q6600 for between $4.50 and $6.00 shipped. I guess at that price I don't see the harm of paying for one; I was pessimistically guessing that people were selling them for insane "it's retro!" prices.
 
Core2Duo can still run stripped down windows 10 passably.

Something I think a lot of people don't realize is there's a whole world of "economy" gamers out there. In Africa, Brazil, Argentina, People want to play PC games but cannot possibly afford a current-gen RTX card. But they can buy an old 775 board, some ram, and an old GTX card. Its good enough to play modernish games on very low settings. They aren't in it for the nostalgia so much as a form of entertainment they can afford.

That's the "real" market for these obsolete things right now, not "its retro!".

Eudimorphodon said:
FWIW, eBay is claiming I can get a Q6600 for between $4.50 and $6.00 shipped. I guess at that price I don't see the harm of paying for one; I was pessimistically guessing that people were selling them for insane "it's retro!" prices.
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I'm actually not interested in the Q6600 because while it IS quad-core, its got a low clock speed of only 2.33ghz. I'd frankly rather have a dual-core 3.33ghz than a quad-core at a lower clock speed, but thats also a "me" problem. Kind of annoying but the high-clock quad cores are still commanding relatively large prices, which annoys me. I really want one of the core 2 quad extremes that's basically 2 dual-core CPUs on a single chip, but am not sure its compatible with either 775 board in my inventory. I don't nee it, I'm pretty sure I'm hitting max possible game performance on the dual-core 3.33ghz in the UltimateX. But we need dreams, right?
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Core2Duo can still run stripped down windows 10 passably.

Something I think a lot of people don't realize is there's a whole world of "economy" gamers out there. In Africa, Brazil, Argentina, People want to play PC games but cannot possibly afford a current-gen RTX card. But they can buy an old 775 board, some ram, and an old GTX card. Its good enough to play modernish games on very low settings. They aren't in it for the nostalgia so much as a form of entertainment they can afford.

That's the "real" market for these obsolete things right now, not "its retro!".



I'm actually not interested in the Q6600 because while it IS quad-core, its got a low clock speed of only 2.33ghz. I'd frankly rather have a dual-core 3.33ghz than a quad-core at a lower clock speed, but thats also a "me" problem. Kind of annoying but the high-clock quad cores are still commanding relatively large prices, which annoys me. I really want one of the core 2 quad extremes that's basically 2 dual-core CPUs on a single chip, but am not sure its compatible with either 775 board in my inventory. I don't nee it, I'm pretty sure I'm hitting max possible game performance on the dual-core 3.33ghz in the UltimateX. But we need dreams, right?
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The reason the Q6600 was a super chip was that Intel was making mostly dual core chips capable of 3.6 GHz and the Q6600 has two of them. That makes the Q6600 a superb overclocker since one only needs to bump the clocks up to what the chip can handle. Often, the overclocked Q6600 would end up using less than the 130W the TDP suggested was necessary at stock speeds.
 
I'm not a fan of over-clocking, especially older hardware like that. I'd rather run at native clock speed.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
I'm actually not interested in the Q6600 because while it IS quad-core, its got a low clock speed of only 2.33ghz.
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Nitpick, it was 2.4Ghz, and:
krebizfan said:
The reason the Q6600 was a super chip was that Intel was making mostly dual core chips capable of 3.6 GHz and the Q6600 has two of them. That makes the Q6600 a superb overclocker since one only needs to bump the clocks up to what the chip can handle. Often, the overclocked Q6600 would end up using less than the 130W the TDP suggested was necessary at stock speeds.
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This. The later runs of the Q6600 were essentially the same silicon as the C2Q Extreme QX6850, and those chips had the same multiplier between FSB and core. (IE, the Q6600 was 2.4/1066, the QX6850 was 3.0/1333.) If you drop a Q6600 into a board that can handle a QX6850 that'll let you overclock it there's a very good chance you'll get at *least* that good out of it. Here's an old Anandtech article discussing how both older and newer revisions of the core could handle 3.33ghz+.

As a general rule the lowest clocked versions of any given Intel core revision are usually the most rewarding if overclocking is your bag, and the Q6600 is no exception.
 
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