Changing my CPU

[Professor James]

When I moved to where I currently reside; the people who used to live here left behind a couple things like a nick jr. magazine subscription, a mice problem, but also an old CPU. I hooked up the old CPU and I found out 3 things: 1. its a bit of a junk computer that happens to run on windows XP,2. It had Microsoft Office 2007 so I didn't need to buy it myself and 3. Even though its RAM and graphics card are complete garbage, its processor actually has more gigahertz then mine.

My Processor

Intel Pentium Dual CPU E2220 @ 2.40 Ghz

Its Processor

Intel Pentium 4 CPU @ 2.80 Ghz (2 CPUs)

Due to them being both Intel Pentiums I think that they would be compatible for a switch but I'm not an expert of such of an operation and want to know if this would work in the first place.

 

[Professor James]

First of all, no, they're probably not compatible; your processor runs on an LGA 775 chipset, and Pentium 4 processors running at 2.8GHz all run on the Socket 478 chipset, with the exception of the Pentium 4 HT 620.

Secondly, if it actually is a Pentium 4, you don't want to swap it anyway. The Pentium 4 was, in a word, shit. Intel decided to make the pipeline of the processor extremely long, which means that it gets substantially less power per megahertz than your Pentium Dual-Core which runs on the Core microarchitecture. What's more, there never was a dual-core Pentium 4 - the NetBurst architecture was the first to showcase Intel's Hyper-Threading technology, which puts two threads onto each processor core. There is a NetBurst processor series with two cores, named Pentium D, but it suffers from the same problems as the Pentium 4. Anyway, I expect no matter what it is, it's not as good as your current processor.

Thanks for your post, I meant that the junk PC had 2 Cpus and was not a solo or a quad. I will seriously consider cancelling the operation although I would like some more opinions.