delete

[qbackin]

 

[AristoV300]

If you are planning to overclock then I would say go with the 3.0E or 3.2E. If not I would say go with a Northwood core.

 

[qbackin]

Well im on a budget, so maybe little less?
Has ANY one used this board?
Another link....http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1394&page=1
Its the G model....

 

[emilyek]

I'd search the aopen support forums, and see what kinds of problems it may have.

I have an Aopen on the 865 chipset, and it does not like my prescott at all, in terms of the temps/power consumption. Since it's an 875 i bet it will be ok, but I'd still check first.

 

[Dough1397]

2.26b M0 stepping oc to 3.3 ish on stock vcore

 

[AristoV300]

Originally posted by: qbackin
Well im on a budget, so maybe little less?
Has ANY one used this board?
Another link....http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1394&page=1
Its the G model....

What is your max to spend on the chip?

 

[qbackin]

Less than 100, 2.4c range.

 

[stevty2889]

get a northwood and over clock the crap outta it. My 2.4c ran at 3.1ghz at default voltage(not on that motherboard, but they do have good potential).

 

[Mare of Earth]

I got the same board - question for the experts - anyone try running a Celeron D 2.5? Got the processor on clearance at Microcenter (cheap) and they said it would work, but Aopen tech support could only guess - they never tried it.

Also, anyone have any good overclocking tips for this processor? It is essentially going to be a placeholder until the price of the P4s come down into my price range.

The intel website says "Supports the highest performance Intel® Pentium® 4 processors plus, the flexibility to support other 478-pin Intel® processors." on the page for the 875P chipset.

 

[qbackin]

I was wondering the same thing, I have 2 Celey D cpus....
I do know the CeleyD is a mad overclocker...

 

[Mare of Earth]

VirtualLarry posted the following on the Hot Deals thread for this board:

>>>>>Wow, that's "mad cheap" for an real i875 board. Looks like a quality board with some nice OC features as well. Hot Deal!

mfg link / CPU test report / DRAM test report / BIOS update

Some reviews of the AX4C "Max" here, here. The board the CompGeeks is selling is the same layout, except minus the CSA ethernet, Promise SATA RAID, and Agere Firewire. It still appears to have the dual BIOS, "Hercules" PCI slot, and a few other features, from the pics. This board would make this a nearly-perfect rig to use with an OC'ed Celly-D CPU - if an updated BIOS can be found. Btw, since this is the Japanese edition of the product, it is unlikely to be supported in any way by AOpen's US offices.

(Edited and removed extra stuff to improve clarity of thread. Search for updated BIOS underway. Unsure at this point if the board will support Celeron-D CPUs or not.) <<<<<

Now, I submitted the question to Aopen DrOpen system and got the following reply:

>>>>>From: Niño (3/11/2005 9:40:57 AM)
Dear Mare,

Thanks for your valuable support on our Motherboard products and to inform us about the issue.

In response to your problem, we would like to inform you Sir that our AX4C-G model does not support with this type of processor. However, if you want to upgrade your processor for your motherboard, kindly refer to our test report for compatibility reason.

Any further comments or suggestion, please feel free to email us again.

Thank you very much Sir for your attention and cooperation<<<<<<<

I replied with:

>>>>>From: Mare (3/11/2005 12:39:42 PM)
I thank you for your reply.
I understand that the BIOS that comes with this motherboard apparently only supports the Northwood processors. Is there an alteration I can make to the BIOS to let it also accept the Prescott processors? I cannot afford a Northwood processor at this time - however, I have a Prescott -type processor that I would like to use in the board (Celeron D 325). The board is very nice, and I am very happy with it. You will most likely be seeing this question crop up frequently over the next few weeks, as computergeeks.com had a very good price on your high-quality board and so many of the people that frequent the anandtech.com forums purchased one. The MaxII version of this board has a BIOS update to support the Prescott-type chips - would that BIOS work on the board I have?
Thank you for your time.>>>>>>

We shall see what they answer. I seriously doubt the BIOS for the MaxII version of the board would work, but if they get enough inquiries, maybe someone will figure out an answer. I don't know much about programming, so writing in the changes myself is waaaay out.

Anyone else come up with anything?


On a side note, has anyone just hard-tested the silly thing yet? I would, but I am waiting for a power supply for the shiny new case the whole mess is in. I am still not sure what the major differences are between the Northwood CPUs and the Prescott CPUs - I am learning as I go on much of this. Microcenter and the Aopen tech support guy I spoke with initially thought it should just work, but since the BIOS was mentioned on the Hot Deals thread, I have the time to bother Aopen about it. (new power supply is supposed to arrive Sat or Mon.)

 

[aidanjm]

Originally posted by: Mare of Earth
Also, anyone have any good overclocking tips for this processor? It is essentially going to be a placeholder until the price of the P4s come down into my price range.

One good thing about the aopen boards is their flexibility in vcore settings. You can set vcore to below default for a cooler (and therefore quieter) running chip.
My celeron D seems to overclock very easily. My Celeron D 2.4 Ghz is stable at 3 Ghz on lower than default vcore (I have it set to 1.2 volts, the default voltage for my chip is 1.35) with pc2700 memory. I am sure it will easily go to 3.6 Ghz when I get some pc3200 or higher memory. It's not as hot as I thought it would be, either. It hovers at 36-38 idle, with a zalman 7000 alcu heatsink (fan on the lowest speed setting).

 

[VirtualLarry]

I missed out on getting that board from Compgeeks myself, it sold out faster than I expected.
Anyways, there are three primary issues related to compatibility.

One is the electrical/physical pinout compatibility. Both are S478, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Two is the power/cooling support, generally in terms of how powerful the mobo's CRU VRMs are, and how good your overall cooling setup is. Prescotts take a lot more power than Northwoods, or at least compared to early Northwood designs, so Intel had to come out with a new spec for mobos to properly support the full line of S478 Prescott CPUs. Now, this is a Celly-D we're talking about, which has less cache, and takes less power, than a full-blown P4, so this will be less of an issue, although it could still be a minor one and limit your possible overall overclock due to power issues.

Third is BIOS. All Intel (and AMD, etc) CPUs have "bugs" in them. Ever since the PPro era, Intel added the ability to "patch" some of those CPU bugs, by implementing downloadable microcode. This has to be loaded into the CPU by the BIOS when the system boots. Some software may be more-or-less affected by those bugs. For example, Windows XP SP2, requires an up-to-date BIOS microcode for Prescott CPUs to operate properly. Most BIOSes these days are implemented from a somewhat generic Award-BIOS OEM core, that is then customized for each mobo maker. The BIOS is modular, and with appropriate "BIOS hacking" tools, you can extract the module responsible for holding the microcode updates, and swap one with another, assuming that there is enough room in the BIOS to hold the bigger tables. So for example, if you took the recent 7/2004 BIOS release for the AOpen "Max II" version of this board (which officially supports Prescott CPUs), and extracted the microcode tables, and then inserted them into the BIOS for this board, I think that it should work. (This has worked before for many other boards in a similar manner.)

But because the board wasn't designed to support the power-consumption of Prescott S478 CPUs, and they have a newer-model board that they sell that does, AOpen is very unlikely to ever officially give you any support for running a Celly-D in this board. The BIOS-hackers on the forum at Wim's BIOS should be able to help more, they do this sort of thing all of the time for people.

 

[Mare of Earth]

After doing a bit of web searching - Phoenix Award BIOS also offers BIOS upgrades. I will call them and see what they say.

 

[qbackin]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
I missed out on getting that board from Compgeeks myself, it sold out faster than I expected.
Anyways, there are three primary issues related to compatibility.

One is the electrical/physical pinout compatibility. Both are S478, so that shouldn't be an issue.

Two is the power/cooling support, generally in terms of how powerful the mobo's CRU VRMs are, and how good your overall cooling setup is. Prescotts take a lot more power than Northwoods, or at least compared to early Northwood designs, so Intel had to come out with a new spec for mobos to properly support the full line of S478 Prescott CPUs. Now, this is a Celly-D we're talking about, which has less cache, and takes less power, than a full-blown P4, so this will be less of an issue, although it could still be a minor one and limit your possible overall overclock due to power issues.

Third is BIOS. All Intel (and AMD, etc) CPUs have "bugs" in them. Ever since the PPro era, Intel added the ability to "patch" some of those CPU bugs, by implementing downloadable microcode. This has to be loaded into the CPU by the BIOS when the system boots. Some software may be more-or-less affected by those bugs. For example, Windows XP SP2, requires an up-to-date BIOS microcode for Prescott CPUs to operate properly. Most BIOSes these days are implemented from a somewhat generic Award-BIOS OEM core, that is then customized for each mobo maker. The BIOS is modular, and with appropriate "BIOS hacking" tools, you can extract the module responsible for holding the microcode updates, and swap one with another, assuming that there is enough room in the BIOS to hold the bigger tables. So for example, if you took the recent 7/2004 BIOS release for the AOpen "Max II" version of this board (which officially supports Prescott CPUs), and extracted the microcode tables, and then inserted them into the BIOS for this board, I think that it should work. (This has worked before for many other boards in a similar manner.)

But because the board wasn't designed to support the power-consumption of Prescott S478 CPUs, and they have a newer-model board that they sell that does, AOpen is very unlikely to ever officially give you any support for running a Celly-D in this board. The BIOS-hackers on the forum at Wim's BIOS should be able to help more, they do this sort of thing all of the time for people.

Bump for resoloution

 

[Mare of Earth]

Progress currently halted due to inability to get BIOS codes for Phoenix Award. For anyone else who has this mobo - their site has a program - BIOS Sleuth - that will tell you all the info needed - I am stalled till my replacement power supply shows up.

 

[qbackin]

Originally posted by: Mare of Earth
Progress currently halted due to inability to get BIOS codes for Phoenix Award. For anyone else who has this mobo - their site has a program - BIOS Sleuth - that will tell you all the info needed - I am stalled till my replacement power supply shows up.

I dont know what your sayin??
I have a P4 2.4c on the way for it.....hope its all good

 

[Mare of Earth]

Just stating that I am stalled until sometime tomorrow (Monday) when my new power supply shows up.
What did you give for the P4? I couldn't find one that wasn't in the mid-$100s.

 

[MisterChief]

Originally posted by: aidanjm

Originally posted by: Mare of Earth
Also, anyone have any good overclocking tips for this processor? It is essentially going to be a placeholder until the price of the P4s come down into my price range.

One good thing about the aopen boards is their flexibility in vcore settings. You can set vcore to below default for a cooler (and therefore quieter) running chip.
My celeron D seems to overclock very easily. My Celeron D 2.4 Ghz is stable at 3 Ghz on lower than default vcore (I have it set to 1.2 volts, the default voltage for my chip is 1.35) with pc2700 memory. I am sure it will easily go to 3.6 Ghz when I get some pc3200 or higher memory. It's not as hot as I thought it would be, either. It hovers at 36-38 idle, with a zalman 7000 alcu heatsink (fan on the lowest speed setting).

:thumbsup:

 

[VirtualLarry]

So is there anyone with one of these older AOpen S478 boards, that is at least sucessfully POST'ing with a Prescott-core Celeron-D installed? If you have both of these, then it shouldn't hurt to try it, it shouldn't burn anything, although XP SP2 might fail to boot properly without an updated BIOS installed.

 

[qbackin]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
So is there anyone with one of these older AOpen S478 boards, that is at least sucessfully POST'ing with a Prescott-core Celeron-D installed? If you have both of these, then it shouldn't hurt to try it, it shouldn't burn anything, although XP SP2 might fail to boot properly without an updated BIOS installed.

 

[Mare of Earth]

Well, after my new power supply finally arriving today, I now know - POST beep code HighLowHighLowHighLowetc..... is the result. From what POST codes I have been able to find here on the 'Net, That particular code means "Bad CPU".
Damn.
So, any suggestions, or do I just replace the Celly-D with a P4?