Building Prescott?

willbemcse

Senior member
Sep 14, 2003
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Hi
I was thinking of building a E system but after reading this article on ocp
"thing that bothers me most that we have yet to see and will not be seeing for a while is the toll that will be taken on these motherboards by having to deal with all of this heat. It was not uncommon for us to see capacitors at 235F. That is certainly enough to burn you quite quickly. How are those capacitors and other motherboard components going to react to being baked for days at a time...or better yet, months at a time. I have a gut feeling that we are going to see a lot of Prescott related failures on the current motherboards that are in the market even if they are "Prescott Ready." " Changed my mine , will I see a big performance difference because of 1MB cache . The article also said that E didn't worked with Asus only with MSI and Abit IC7-G, I guesss these are my only choices .


What kind of memory is good for this setup.
 

Schadenfroh

Elite Member
Mar 8, 2003
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i highly reccomend against a prescott system, performance barely keeps up with the regular p4s, go with a AMD 64 or a Northwood C
 

tallman45

Golden Member
May 27, 2003
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Baed on teh paragraph that you posted the giant red flad here is heat and how reliable a system on would have. Go with a P4 'C". You will definately see a difference between the 2, mostly when the Prescott system is turned off to be cooled down.
 

LouPoir

Lifer
Mar 17, 2000
11,201
126
106
I would not go the Prescott way for now. I had a 3.0e and it could not keep up with my 3.0c side by side. It also runs hotter. Overclocks about the same.

Lou
 

Gamingphreek

Lifer
Mar 31, 2003
11,679
0
81
I also would not go with a prescott...yet. Right now i would go with a 2.4C processor or an A64. A64 for highend 2.4C for not as high. After about 6 months then it will probably be time to take a good hard look at prescott because clock speeds will be somewhere around 4GHZ.
 

batmanuel

Platinum Member
Jan 15, 2003
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From the reviews and benches I've seen, the Prescott is a slight but measurable bit slower in most apps than the Northwoods running at the same clock speed, due to longer 31 stage execution pipeline. At some point the new SSE3 extentions may help boost the Prescott's performance a bit when they are implemented in spftware, but right now there is little reason to choose an E over a C chip at the same clock speed. You can always get a Northwood now, along with a motherboad that is Prescott ready, and upgrade later when faster versions become available, since from the reviews I've read indicate that 3.6GHz is about the point where the Prescott really begins to shine. Of course by then, Intel may have the whole line transitioned over to the new socket, but that's what make's buying now a bit of a pain. In six months you're gonna see PCI Express, DDR-2, new sockets for both Intel and AMD, and probably command-queing capable integrated SATA RAID controllers, so if you absolutely have to buy now I'd avoid the latest, greatest and most expensive in favor of getting something cheap and dirty like a 2.4C and a 865PE board and saving your pennies for the new hotness at the end of the year.
 

willbemcse

Senior member
Sep 14, 2003
432
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I cann't really wait 6 months want to build something right know. Isn't IMB cache and more instructions make a difference as for OC I hardly do it . For P4 If I go for it will be 2.8C with Abit IC7-G or Asus P4C800 DLX. Any sugestions on what kind and brand of memory, I was thinking of getting Corsair 3700.
 

batmanuel

Platinum Member
Jan 15, 2003
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Actually, I think the 1MB of cache is what is keeping the Prescott from benchmarking a LOT slower than similarly clocked Northwoods (like the first P4s compared to PIIIs and Athlons of the day), since a large cache can help offset the perfromance penalty from a longer execution pipeline. All things being equal, a larger cache does make a difference in performance (as in case of the P4 EE models) but since the Prescotts are of a slightly different architecture than the Northwoods, twice the L2 cache doesn't automatically yield better performance (although it really depends a lot on the application you're using, with media encoding benefiting the most from more cache).
 

willbemcse

Senior member
Sep 14, 2003
432
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Hi batmanuel
I will be using this pc for graphics (Photoshop), video editing , games . As the price is almost same as the old P4 thats why I was thinking of building a Prescott . Dont know if having a 1MB cache will make that much difference and as for OCing would like to have a more room for it .

 

batmanuel

Platinum Member
Jan 15, 2003
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At this point, I'd still recommend a Northwood C. Most overclock really well and they are at a really nice price point right now. From what I've read, the Prescotts seem kinda spotty as far as overclocking goes, which tends to be the normally the case when a chip goes through a redesign and a die shrink. The exact same thing happened with the first version of the Athlon T-Breds, only to be fixed by adding another metal layer to the processor core to make the T-Bred rev B. I think the Prescott eventually will be a pretty nice processor, but right now there are a few issues that need to be ironed out (mostly heat-related). The fact that MSI seems to have removed vcore tweaks from their latest Prescott-supporting BIOSes (as HardOCP reported) sends up red flags as well. It just seems too soon to buy a Prescott yet.
 

MichaelZ

Senior member
Oct 12, 2003
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socket 775 prescott is what you want, not the 478 ones.

the socket 478 prescott is in the same position as the socket 423 pentium 4's when they came out. slow and pricy, in need of refining.
 

batmanuel

Platinum Member
Jan 15, 2003
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Originally posted by: i82lazyboy
socket 775 prescott is what you want, not the 478 ones.

the socket 478 prescott is in the same position as the socket 423 pentium 4's when they came out. slow and pricy, in need of refining.

I say amen, brother! Preach that truth!

Of course the same thing can be said concerning the current crop of A64s. They have Slot A written all over them. Now is just a super sucky time to be buying anything new.