Intel Pentium® 4, 2.0 GHz (BX80532PC2000D) Processor

Although I usually prefer AMD's processors over those from Intel, I had one of these CPUs in a Dell GX260 I purchased from eBay.

For those with a technical bent this is the C1 stepping of the Northword core using a 0.13 micron fabrication process it squeezes some 55 million transistors, 8 Kb of L1 cache and 512 Kb of L2 cache into a handy 478 pin FC PGA2 package. A 400 MHz bus and a multiplier of 200 gives a CPU speed of 2.0 GHz.

This is a nice little processor and considerably faster then the 800MHz Pentium III I had been using prior to this.

If you want to upgrade an older PC, it is important to check your motherboard and BIOS combination will work with this CPU before proceeding and, if they do, I suspect you may be happy with the improvement the upgrade yields.

Whilst upgrading a CPU is a relatively painless process and I have done it many times with very few problems and no loss of life there are many potential pitfalls so if you don't know what you are doing or are frightened of making an expensive mistake the advice is, as always, DON'T DO IT!

Regards
tbod