The new Intel processors, based on the Prescott core, released a week ago, have sparked controversy over the feasibility of their acquisition due to their medium performance and the existence of better alternatives, such as Northwood processors, which offer better value for money.
As is well known, one of the main problems of Prescott processors is their high heat dissipation (their temperature can reach up to 70 degrees), which can cause stability problems in the absence of proper cooling and proper air circulation and of course limits the processing capabilities of processors and requires more extreme means of cooling. Bring them to speeds significantly higher than the source.
On their launch day, different sites reported different speeds with the new processors, with some (AnandTech, for example) reporting a fairly respectable speed while others (HardOCP) claimed that the processors were not compatible with Overeklock, at least not in their current version.
To examine the issue further, HardOCP wrote a test for 2.8E processor and several motherboards of three major companies in the market (Asus, Abit and MSI) and the results were quite surprising.
Unlike the first processor they tested (3.2E), this time the processor showed reasonable OC performance and managed to reach a nice speed of 3.3GHz (extra 500MHz) with air cooling only with the heat sink that comes with the processor, but the real improvement was only obtained using water cooling (Koolance Exos), which brought the processor to a speed of 3.64GHz (an addition of 840MHz), which indicates the amount of heat that the processor emits.
Stronger cooling (such as Phase Change or Liquid Nitrogen) is likely to achieve much higher speeds, but most people who do not have such equipment will prefer the Northwood processors that offer good acceleration capabilities with basic and standard cooling.
