Replacing P3 with P4 Motherboard

[owensdj]

I'm going to replacing a Tyan Trinity 400 P3 ATX motherboard with a new Asus P4B533 P4 motherboard. I'll also be replacing the power supply with an Antec TruePower 380W power supply. Will I have any problems getting the new P4 motherboard into the case? I assume the layout of the standoffs didn't change with the P4 boards? I've always put P4 boards into cases that were made for P4 use, so I wasn't sure about this. Thanks for any info you could give me.

 

[Peter]

You will need to watch the layout of the connector face plate, and the depth of the board. In some really small cases, the deeper boards make the DIMMs collide with the drives.

 

[BarryAZ]

One thing to look out for, in addition to the power supply (I prefer 400W and up for P4/Athlons) is cooling. Often enough a case for a P3 doesn't offer a spot for either a rear mounted or side mounted fan. The P4 and Athlons do run hotter.

In one situation I had, I worked around this by getting a power supply which had an internal fan so that it would pull air from the CPU.

 

[RalfHutter]

The Trinity is a full-size ATX board just like the P4B533. You'll have no trouble with the hole pattern as that's standardized in the ATX Specification. The boards are almost the same physical size so that won't be a problem either. You will need the I/O plate for the P4B533 that Peter mentioned but the correct plate comes with the P4B533 so that won't be a problem either.

Case cooling shouldn't be an issue either, unless you've got a pretty crappy case. Very few P4's need extra side holes cut into the case to improve cooling. The standard case fan(s) plus the two fans on the TruePower should be fine, unless you're planning some wild overclocking.