Difference between revisions of "Pentium 4 Motherboards"

Revision as of 19:57, 17 April 2018

Socket 423

Socket 423 was the first Pentium 4 socket. It was rather short-lived, but still went through a few changes in its life. It only supported early Willamette core CPUs, which were mostly deemed as below expectations product.

Most Socket 423 motherboards used RDRAM with Intel 850 chipset instead of the more common DDR or SDRAM, making it too expesive, and so, as an unforseen result, it can be considered a fabled rarity in some areas of the world.

The first Pentium 4 chipset to support DDR was VIA P4X266 (mid-2001), and its price/performance balance was promising indeed. Meanwhile Intel pushed out the i845, which only supported PC133 SDRAM in its early steppings. It was too slow for obvious reasons, and by the time Intel 845 B0-Step (aka 845D, aka 845DDR) was ready, Socket 478 almost completely took over the market.

Today: Unless you're into historically accurate systems or, for some reason you need to work with P4 1.3GHz, there's very little sense in building such rig these days. The 2.0GHz Pentium 4 is about as fast as a Tualatin 1.4GHz while consuming a lot more power.

Socket 478

Socket 478

There are four major cores available for this socket: Willamette, Northwood, Prescott and Gallatin.

• Willamette is exactly the same basic core found in the earliest Socket-423 CPUs. Support for these can be found in any period chipset: Intel 850, Intel 845, VIA P4X266, SiS645. Few Intel Celeron processors were introduced, based on something called Willamette-128, with reduced L2 cache. Perfomance drop mixed with already questionable P4 architecture made these a poor choice for most if its production cycle.

Best used: As a static exhibit.

• Northwood is the first upgrade to Intel's NetBurst design. L2 cache is double that of a Willamette (512kB vs 256kB), manufacturing process moved to 130nm (the same as Tualatin), minor bugs and perfomance bottlenecks taken care of. Northwood is supported by pretty much any early 2000s P4 chipset, although in some cases, microcode update is required (system might still boot, but won't show proper CPU information). Hyper-Threading technology was available for some models since late-2002. As with the earlier Willamette-128, the Northwood-128 was introduced sometime after the main Pentium 4 lineup.

Northwood core is also known for Sudden Northwood Death Syndrome or SNDS. Setting the CPU voltage above certain level will gradually damage critical areas of the silicon, causing glitches, and ultimately, in some cases, rendering the CPU completely useless. There is no internal circuit to prevent this or even warn the user of a danger ahead. Keep that in mind while picking up used Northwood P4, as they generally were highly overclockable.

Best used: With i850E and RDRAM. Northwoods with 800MHz FSB go with i875P chipset.

• Prescott

• Gallatin

Today: The most interesting are perhaps Northwood and Gallatin. Gallatin is the Extreme Edition chip, a rebranded Xeon core with L3 cache.

Socket 775

Socket 775

Otherwise known as LGA 775. Prescott and Cedar Mill Pentium 4 CPUs, Dual-Core Pentium D, and of course Core 2, used this socket. Early LGA 775 boards do not support Core 2, although later boards often support all LGA 775 CPUs.

Uniquely, "combo" LGA 775 boards with older Intel 865 chipset were popular for a short period of time. Some of those support Core 2 CPUs as well. ASUS P5PE-VM is one such board. Combined with single-core Celeron 400 series CPU, it results in system that features quite an extraordinary mix:

• Fully Win98 compatible, with complete device driver support.
• AGP 4x/8x that can reliably run with GeForce 2, and possibly even later Riva TNT2s.
• Single-core CPU which is a direct descendant to Intel's own, "classic" P6 architecture.
• 35 Watts TDP compared to ~100 Watts for Pentium 4s of the time. When downclocking to 533MHz FSB, passive cooling should be sufficient.
• Serial ATA or IDE drives supported.

The last Intel chipset to officially support Windows 98/ME is i925XE. It is capable of running most of the 90s games designed for Windows 98, and using PCI-E graphic card is rarely a brickwall.

Today: LGA 775 with i945/i955 or later chipset is not an option for old games because these boards do not support Windows 9x. While i915/i925 chipsets do support Windows 9x, i865 is a more classic design, with AGP and no obvious obstacles in running any Windows 9x game.