This question is based off a class discussion I am having but always looking to seek more feed from others, so here is the original version of that discussion, mind you I am talking about the book when concern with page reference so you might have to look up some of these terms if you don't know them. With that being said I need people with hardware experience to answer this, any posts that say take this processor or that one without going into detail will be considered off topic and will be reported.

A friend of mine ask me to help him pick out some parts, of course he understands my lack of knowledge there of so both of us have been combing neweggs trying to look around and see what we could find.

To start off with the dilemma he wanted to find out which was better Core2Quad against the Pentium XE 965

Here

Here

To start off I looked at the specs and compared the two, I looked at the Operating frequency first to make things easy for me.

c2q -2.4GHz XE- 3.20, 3.46 GHz and 3.73 GHz (Wins)

by comparing the two freqs, it would seem that the XE has the better speed of the two, however, I know better then that since going into our 4th week. So at this point in time XE has one point for better processing speed.

Next I looked at the L1 L2 and L3 cache and see what they both support

c2q- (winner)
L1 Cache 64KB+64KB
L2 Cache 2 x 4MB

XE -
L2 Cache 2x1MB and 2x2MB
L3 Cache NA

Now the books mentions on page 136 that more ram on the L1 L2 the better, now with that in mind nad I think I am looking at this correctly the C2Q has a total of 8.1 mb of RAM and the XE has 6MB but no L1 or L3 cache memory. So with that in mind C2Q has the better memory for running the processor while the XE lacks in it by 2MB.

Now I am looking at the FSB, using page 20 and 131 for my reference:

c2q - 1066MHz XE 800 MHz and 1066 MHz (winner by narrow margin)

Well this would be a close call since both FSB are in the current standards but if I were to decide I would have to go with the XE, because of the fact depending on how you use the computer you could still use 800 MHz without no problem and if you into the high end of things then you can bump it up to 1066 MHz. While the C2Q is at the standard I think it's a bit to much for a general user.

I could go on and on but if you read the specs for these two processors and the help with this comparision chart Here

To me it would close call, both have there pro's and con's, would it be fair to say that the C2Q would be the better of the choice due to how it can handle raw power at a much slower speed? Or would giving up memory for speed be the better choice?
I haven't factor in the price yet because the most money never really gives you the best product.

Mind you he has not decided yet, still a bit shocked he has ask me although he's a hardware guy himself (maybe a bit above my knowledge)