Good Afternoon All,

Does anyone have any hands-on experience with or expert knowledge about the 
performance of Intel's Pentium D 945 (or Pentium D 935) processor compared 
to Intel's recently introduced E4400 Core 2 Duo processor?

In the Dell machine I wish to order, both CPUs run with a 800 MHz FSB and 
use 667 MHz DDR2 memory. Also both processors are within a few dollars of 
each other in Dell's pricing structure, but curiously the older technology 
Pentium D 945 which has 2x2MB L2 cache and supports VT (Intel's 
Virtualization Technology) is priced slightly higer than the just introduced 
Core 2 Duo E4400 which has1x2MB shared L2 cache and lacks VT support.

Does this mean that the Pentium D 945 is the better performing processor, or 
does it simply mean that D 945 is more expensive to manufacture than the 
newer Core 2 Duo E4400? Unfortunately Dell doesn't include either processor 
in their current CPU performance chart, so one is left guessing which CPU 
offers the better overall performance.

See: 
http://www.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/global/products/dimen/topics/en/dhs_cpu_landing?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs.

While reseaching this topic I learned that testing results posted at various 
online hardware forums seem to indicate the E4400 has the edge over the D 
945 in most benchmark categories, sometimes significantly so.

Surprisingly, I've also read in a couple highly technical, genuinely geekish 
forums that all Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs have many and serious design and/or 
coding flaws that Intel has yet to address and fix. These reports advised 
against buying any machine using a Core 2 Duo processor until Intel's fixes 
the problems in revised and updated versions of these CPUs which are likely, 
or so concluded the authors of teh reports I read, to be released in about a 
year's time.

Bottom line is: which processor should I select?

Thanks in advance to one and all for landing me a hand in making the proper 
choice.  I remain,

Yours with Kind Regards,
Jeffrey Ottie


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