a fundamental question about B and C chips and motherboards

[Wedge1]

I'm wondering if the B and C intel chips must be run on boards with the respective 533 and 800 bus speeds? Or are these chips backwards compatible to the 400mhz boards?

i.e., could I buy a B or C chip to work with my current 400mhz Asus board until I upgrade to a board that accomodates the higher bus speeds?

 

[4x4expy]

Originally posted by: Wedge1
I'm wondering if the B and C intel chips must be run on boards with the respective 533 and 800 bus speeds? Or are these chips backwards compatible to the 400mhz boards?

i.e., could I buy a B or C chip to work with my current 400mhz Asus board until I upgrade to a board that accomodates the higher bus speeds?

It will work in you board but your clock speed will suffer as the multiplier does not change so you take a hit in speed.

 

[Wedge1]

Umm.....I'm new to this so I'm not sure what you are saying. If your saying that I will not see the adavantages of a chip that works with 533 or 800mhz bus speeds then that is easily understood.

But it seems that you are saying that I will not even be able to see the 400mhz bus speeds if I install a B or C chip. Is this correct? You see, I don't know anything about multipliers. I've got a lot to learn yet.

 

[RalfHutter]

The speed of an Intel chip is set by the Multiplier and the FSB (Frontside Bus speed in MHz) and the multiplier is fixed so the only way you can change the speed of an Intel CPU is by changing the FSB speed.

Let's use a 2.4C (800MHz) CPU for example.

This chip has a multiplier of "12" and runs at 200MHz(quad-pumped) on a 800MHz board like a Springdale or Canterwood. So it's speed is derived from the multiplier (12) x the bus speed (200MHz) for a total of 2400MHz.

If you put this same CPU on a older 400Mhz (100MHz, quad-pumped) board and assume no OC, it would run at 12 x 100 or 1200MHz..

So unless you could overclock your older 400MHz board your shiny new 2.4C CPU would only be running at 1.2GHz.

See?