im a bit confused about these two processors. pentium D processor. and pentium dual core. is there much difference between them. thanks

The Pentium D is based on the P4 & netburst architecture. The Pentium dual-core is a Pentium in name only...it's actually a stripped down version of the Core 2 Duo. In other words, the Pentium dual core is the better of the two...much better ;-)

"Although using the Pentium name, the Pentium Dual Core is based on the Core technology, which can clearly be seen when comparing the specification to the Pentium D series. For example, the Pentium Dual Core has a maximum of 1MB of L2 Cache while the Pentium D processors can have up to 4MB of L2 Cache. But the major difference is the Pentium Dual Core processors only consume 65W peak while the Pentium D consumes a considerable 130W peak consumption which shows its relation to the Core power saving technology. Despite having a smaller L2 cache, the Pentium dual-core is proven to be much faster than the Pentium D under a variety of CPU intensive applications."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentiu...

thanks alot JAM thats the answer i was looking for. excellent

i have noticed that the pentium dual core only goes up to 2.4ghz. can you not buy one with higher clock speeds ? i haven't seen them. the only one i seen was an overclocked dualcore from 1.8ghz to 3.2ghz but can't find a place that sells them.

Clock speed isn't everything, it's the technology behind it that's important. Look at the P4...even with it's high clock speeds it couldn't keep up with lower clocked A64's. That's because the P4 architecture is very inefficient.

I only put Intel CPUs on this chart (give it time to load) but you'll see that the Pentium dual core @ 1.6GHz beats the Pentium D @ 2.8GHz & the P4 @ 3.8GHz.

http://tinyurl.com/6ek8nb

Also, the Pentium duals overclock quite well. The E2140 (1.6GHz) will easily hit 3.0GHz+ on the right board & it *may* not even require a voltage increase.

cheers jam. i have.
motherboard= cpu sockets/slots-1 LGA775
expansion slots=3pci,1pci-Ex1,2pci-Ex16
integrated devices=audio,gigabit,lan,iEEE-1394.
form factor ATX
motherboard chipset=nforce4-sli-x-16-intel
motherboard manufacturer=dell computer corp.

would this be ok for one of those good dualcore overclockers ?

A Dell motherboard? Have you looked at the BIOS settings? Is it overclockable?

no theres nothing in the bios that lets me overclock it.

"no theres nothing in the bios that lets me overclock it"

Didn't think there would be. That blows that idea.

the only thing it says in the bios on performance is, i have a choice to limit cpu limit to 3 or do not limit cpu limit to 3.lol. but if i got the dual core already overclocked by someone else would that be ok then ?