Misinformation about p4 power supplies?

[Midnight1313]

I recently got a P4 and intel 850 motherboard.

I bought a 3dcool Tornado 2000 (which incidently turned out to be a great case), but I was told by 3dcool that it was compatible with the 850 (it's wasn't-I had to drill additional holes in the tray, modify cables and cuss).

Anyway, the motherboard has a normal ATX power supply connector as well as the new 4-pin 12volt connector.

The power supply sent from 3d cool is ATX only (without the 4 pin). Now, I called intel and asked them about using it and they said it was fine. The 4-pin setup was only optional(3dcool also told me this).

Every website reporting on the P4 is saying that you have to replace your power supply to the 4-pin 12-volt design to meet the new standard.

So, did the intel tech (as well as 3dcool) tell me a lie or is all of the sites misinformed???

 

[w9design]

Might I ask why you purchased a P4 system?
Everyone seems to avoid it like the plague; so I'm curious why you went ahead with it.

 

[Midnight1313]

Well, that's a good question.

First, I ordered it before all of the main blunt of the reviews were out (I had only read hopeful previews).

Second, I have a Pentium Pro 200 (which you can imagine is on it's deathbed), so anything I get is going to be incredible compared to what I am used to (actually the Pro has been great for the last 3 years that I've had it though).

I went through the same thing with the pro (If you remember, the preview of the pro was great then it was abondoned completely for the Pentium MMX). It still turned out to be a great computer. I think that the P4 will start showing a brighter side when we see more optimized code to take advantage of new architecture.

And third, I had the money to burn. I wanted to build a computer with the latest gadgets.

P4 1.5/i850
384 PC800 Samsung Rambus
Scsi Adaptec 29160/Seagate Cheetah 15x
3dcool Tornado 2000
Creative Live Plat 5.1
Elsa Gladiac Ultra 64mg
Pioneer 105s slot drive DVD 16x/40x
Hollywood plus decoder card
Teac 3.5
Mitsubitishi 22" 2040u monitor
Hauppauge Win TV-D
Klipsch v.2 400 speakers
3com 10/100 Etherlink


So maybe I'm an idiot for spending too much money, but I'm quite sure I'll still be happy with it (it's still fast as hell compared to a pro!).

 

[Mark R]

Well, does your computer work if you don't connect the 4 pin connector?

If it does, then the review sites are wrong, and Intel is right. If it doesn't then, well, perhaps you know why.

I've found that almost all tech review sites are badly misinformed about things like this - it's best not to put too much emphasis on what you hear from an indirect source. However, to give them some credit - Intel's pre-release Pentium 4 boards would not boot unless the 4 pin connector was connected.

 

[cavingjan]

Isn't the 4 pin connector just to provide more stable voltage right around the cpu? If so, I'd consider it required if and only if the board won't boot without it or you have a major stability problem that this might fix.
Those old PPro's were nice and I thought they ran servers better than MMX chips. Then again I don't recall that my Tyan dually could run the MMX. Unfortunately I don't think we'll get that kind of mileage out of this version socket P4. Maybe when the new socket format comes out next year will we see a setup that has some future.