> just avoid the Prescott CPUs if you can't keep them cool, e.g. SFF case or poorly > ventilated cabinet > That's what I have now. I have a Dell 4700, Prescott 540 Intel Pentium 4 HT, 3.0 GHz. > As I've said, I've had it for about ten years and never had to replace a single part > and it's still running like the day I got it. Maybe I lucked out.
Yeah, it really depends on the quality of the board and the components used. Look after it and it should last 5+ years, leave it untouched inside its box and you'll be lucky to get 2-3 years out of it before everything gets clogged up with dust causing everything to overheat and fail. Of course, that doesn't stop some manufacturers from using cheap or even fake components in order to make it fail by design 6 months after the warranty expires (planned obsolescence).
There have been numerous modern power supplies made which are designed for powering nothing more than a Pentium 2, yet they throw on the 4-pin 12V connector and SATA power connectors and sell it as the latest and greatest, and in real world use it fails within a year because it can't handle anything more than a few amps on the 12V rail and blows up while the 5V rail, with its 30+ amps rating, sits there doing almost nothing as the 5V-heavy CPU vanished after the Pentium 3!
My old Acer is closing in on 70000 hours on-time, bought Xmas 2005. This one has retained its stock 2.8GHz Celeron even though I have a few P4 CPUs which could be used in its place (including a 3.0 Prescott), I may as well keep it as original as possible now that it's reaching its retirement age.
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