which is a better processor overall?
i would like to know if there is any performance matrix which can be viewed as well
this is my 1st posting, hope the response experiance is good :)

Welcome to the PC Guide Forums!! :D

Hmmm... no 'performance matrix' that I can think of, but you can dig around the usual hardware sites (like Anandtech (www.anandtech.com/)) to find really good benchmarking graphs.

One of the issues with this comparison is that there are two versions of the Prescott at 2.4GHz, and two versions of the Northwood (A & C) at 2.6GHz. If I had to put them in order (best to worst), it would be like this:

Northwood C 2.6, 800 FSB, HT
Prescott 2.4, 800 FSB, HT
Northwood A 2.6, 400 FSB, no HT
Prescott 2.4, 533 FSB, no HT

The Northwoods have a much shorter 20-stage pipeline which helps them edge out the massive 31-stage pipeline of the Prescott at similar speeds. The fact that the Prescott has twice as much L2 cache only helps it at higher clock speeds, where it can really take off. The FSB speed also plays a factor in determining overall performance, and while Hyper-Threading isn't always used, I still rank it as a performance-enhancing attribute. There are times when the Northwood A 2.6 would beat a Prescott 2.4/800 using sheer clock speed and a higher IPC, but I ranked them in terms of overall performance.