Socket 478......chosing a mobo

phatboy

phatboy

phatboy

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My old chap currently has a DELL pile of pooh, which i am going to extract the chip from to build a custom machine. The chip is a Northwood 2.0Ghz, im just tryin to work out what mobo is gonna be a vaguely good perfomer with DDR400 compatibility for around £30ish quid.

I havent tried working with Pentiums before, my knowledge exists in AMD, what does the FSB of 800/533 etc mean, do i need a specific 478 board for this chip as it has a low FSB, or will the 800 etc be ok? dont quite understand how t all works. The chip is currently running 10x200mhz, ive heard they clock happily to 2.5ghz.

Any help at all will be greatly received

Cheers

Ben
 
Asrock make a decent 478 board, thought i have had no personal experience with 478 (AMD man myself) might be worth checking out
Asrock P4VM800 Socket 478 VIA P4M800 Chipset FSB 800 AGP 8X 6 Channel SOUND LAN VGA shared 64MB MATX.
But there are still plenty of MSI, Gigabyte, Asus boards around, i've even seen Albatron making a move in the UK though i don't know anything about these ones only that they seem big in America.
 
Your choice is getting more limited by the day, but don't despair as it it's a great platform for overclocking.

Look for something based on the Intel 865 or 875 chipset.

The MSI 6728 i865PE NEO 2 is a particularly good, cheap overclocking board. Much more expensive, but good, boards are the ASUS P4x800 series and the IC7 and IG-80/81 from Abit.

If you want to overclock avoid anything on an SIS chipset and make sure that you have the ability to change the voltage on the CPU.

The AMD chips are x2 so 133FSB = 266MHZ/166FSB = 333MHz/200FSB = 400MHZ

The Intels are x4 so 133FSB = 533MHz and 200FSB = 800MHz. There are no 166FSB Intel chips as far as I know.

The only options you have to change on an Intel P4 are the FSB and the voltages. Only the Engineering Sample (ES) chips could vary the clock multiplier, so you are stuck with that.

The 800MHz chips are generally only limited by the speed of the RAM that goes with them and how cool you can keep them.

On the upside, if you have a 400FSB chip then that will be able to double it's clock speed with PC3200 RAM, so you need only worry about turning up the FSB.

The overclocking process is pretty simple: turn up the FSB until it's not stable anymore then click up the CPU voltage until it's stable. Don't go up more than 4 clicks. If it's not stable after 4 clicks, it's probably not going to get stable. With a 400MHz chip in an 800MHz capable board and PC3200 RAM you should be able to leave the RAM and Northbridge voltages at the defaults so overclocking is really very straightforward.

Good luck.
 
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Excellent, thank you very much guys. It makes more sense to me now :). atleast its not too different to an AMD, which makes life a lot easier.

will get on to looking for an MSi mobo, and refer to this when it comes to overclocking.

many thanks once again

Cheers

Ben
 
Asrock make a decent 478 board, thought i have had no personal experience with 478 (AMD man myself) might be worth checking out
Click to expand...

Yeah strangly enough thats the board on my shopping list before i put up this thread, for £28 you cant go wrong :D
 
phatboy said:
Yeah strangly enough thats the board on my shopping list before i put up this thread, for £28 you cant go wrong :D
Click to expand...
:D plus being part of Asus must make the RnD on these boards good too.
 
thanks for the all the help, new Asrock board, ram, gfx and cooler arrive tomoz, thanks for all the help. Will let you know how it goes :D

Ben
 
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