|
One draw back for
early adopters of the Pentium 4, is the fact that a move to
this new socket 478 pin out, requires a new motherboard
architecture.
 |
| Installation and setup with a
new motherboard platform |
|
Neat as a pin |
|
We actually used a couple of
motherboards in this piece, one reference design from Intel
and
the ever fabulous Abit TH7II-RAID.
Intel's D850MD
Socket 478 Motherboard w/ Integrated LAN and 4 USB Ports
Abit's
TH7II-RAID
The Intel D850MD is
a highly integrated board with 10/100 Ethernet, Sound and 4
ports of USB supported. Most "power users" will find
this board a little limited on expansion with only three PCI
slots. However, system integrators will love this
board for its ease of setup and cost efficiency without the
need to add a dedicated sound card or NIC.
We gave you
a
taste of what the TH7II-RAID could do, in our recent
coverage of this board. This motherboard has all the
toys that we have grown a custom to with BX chipset
motherboards of old. With an integrated High Point
ATA100/RAID controller, sound, three USB ports and even
"Abit Engineered" overclocking strips, PC Gear Heads
that are into the P4 platform, will be all over this board
like a cheap suit.
 |
| Test Setup |
|
Intel and Abit
infused |
|
Intel Based Test
System:
-
Intel Pentium
4 2GHz. Processor
-
Abit
TH7II-RAID Pentium 4 Socket 478 Motherboard
(i850)
-
Intel D850DM
Pentium 4 Socket 478 Motherboard (i850)
-
256MB of
Samsung PC800 RAMBUS DRDRAM
-
nVidia
GeForce3 AGP
-
Thermaltake P4
Volcano 478 Cooler
-
IBM DTLA307030
30Gig ATA100 7200 RPM Hard Drive
-
Windows 2000 Pro SP2
-
WindowsME
-
Direct X 8.0
and nVidia reference drivers version 12.41
-
Intel chipset
drivers version 3.00.029
AMD Based Test
System:
-
AMD
Athlon 1.4GHz. (10.5 X 133)
-
Epox 8K7A+ AMD 761 / VIA 686B Motherboard
-
256MB Corsiar PC2400
(8-8-8-2-4-2-2)
-
IBM 30GB 7200RPM UDMA/100 HD
-
nVidia GeForce3
-
Windows 2000 Pro SP2
-
Direct X 8.0
and nVidia reference drivers version 12.41
-
AMD AGP Mini-Port 5.22
-
VIA 4-in-1 drivers
Earlier in this article we
spoke of the Pentium 4 mPGA 478 package as having superior
thermal characteristics versus the legacy 423 PGA. For
reference, here is a quick take on the thermals as reported
by Winbond's Hardware Doctor program. These numbers
were taken at 2GHz. at idle in WindowsME.
It has been reported and it is factual that Intel
has introduced a "clock throttling" mechanism in the P4,
that is designed to invoke various lower duty cycles
depending on settings within a motherboard's BIOS. If
the core temp of the chip reaches a certain high threshold,
the clock speed to throttled back considerably.
However, we were assured by the folks at Intel that this
does not happen under "normal" conditions. That is to
say, you would need to have catastrophic failure of a fan or
some other subsystem, that would cause the core to reach
dangerous levels. In other words, if this clock
throttle kicks in, consider it cheap insurance because
otherwise you may have one cooked Pentium 4 on your hands.
 |
| Overclocking
With
2GHz. of fun |
|
Overclocking or
overkill? |
|
Now, we know what you are thinking. How does
this "governor" of sorts affect overclocking? Suffice
it to say, not one bit.
CPUID @ 2GHz.
CPUID @ 2.24GHz.
We were actually able to boot windows at 2.3GHz.
but were unable to complete the benchmarks at this clock
speed. Perhaps with a little more TLC, this clock
speed could have stabilized. This overclocking test
was performed on the Abit TH7II-RAID,
with its plethora of front side bus speeds.
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Initial
Tests: SiSoftware Sandra, Winstones and Video 2000 |
