pc_boy said:
i can understand why you are confused, i'll do my best to clear up as much as i can. i'll explain the obvious ways to spot which CPU is faster. given any processor in the same series like durons or pentium3 series, megahertz and cache is what to look for. lets say you have an xp2200 and xp2300. it should be easy to tell the xp2300 is faster.
lets say you have a pentium4 2.2Ghz with 256K L2 cache and and pentium4 2.2Ghz with 512K L2 cache. the one with 512K cache is obviously faster.
now what if you have a pentium4 2.8Ghz with 2048K L2 cache and a pentium4 3.2Ghz 1024K with L2 cache , which is faster? who the hell knows, i would just search google on articles and discussions with info on that specific comparision.
AMD and Intel make processors that compete with each other on the same level. celeron are on the same playing field as duron (see the "xxx-ron" similarity?). pentium4 are on par with XP.
a xp2500 actually runs at 1.83Ghz but can perform simliar to a pentium4 2.5Ghz. look at the xp2500 and P4 2.5Ghz numbers, see the similarities? now what about processors like apple's powerPC CPU and Via C3? (i think thats what they call them) hell if i knew, i just read up on comparision articles and reviews.
and what about overclocking procsessors? you can OC a xp2500 to an equivalent xp3200 CPU performance easily. people brag about this but than if you actually do get a xp3200 you could OC that too so the arguement is mostly to brag.
and FSB front side bus, this mostly can be ignored. it is really only important when overclocking. the exception is when talking about memory FSB, higher FSB means faster in that case. memory FSB & CPU FSB are 2 completely different things. you can have different FSB for both of them. example having a 333Mhz CPU FSB with pc3200 which run at 400Mhz FSB. oops, did i go offtopic?
