I have one of those, my system also came with a P4 3.2.

The only thing I have done with it was to upgrade it to a P4 3.8 just to see if it would work (3.4 is the fastest officially supported). It worked great.
Its a system I would like to find use for but so far its only collecting dust. I do not have the HP media Drive Bay unit either.

After some googling it turns out that the built-in TV tuner is also capable of capturing analog and digital inputs and writing them to the hard drive. When I finish moving the office, I need to set this up and see how it works 😀

I don't like the fact that the P4 machine only supports DDR1 and the CPU is 32-bit so you can't really use 4GB of RAM...

Im pretty sure my system uses the i915 chipset and DDR2 but perhaps my system is a later version.
As long as your system is socket 775 you can upgrade to a 64 bit Pentium 4.

Skyscraper wrote:

I have one of those, my system also came with a P4 3.2.

The only thing I have done with it was to upgrade it to a P4 3.8 just to see if it would work (3.4 is the fastest officially supported). It worked great.
Its a system I would like to find use for but so far its only collecting dust. I do not have the HP media Drive Bay unit either.

I have the Asus ptgd-la motherboard (came out of one of these hp media centers) and with the latest bios it refuses to boot with a 3.8 p4 😢 it's running a p4 524 which when combined with the lack of a pcie port make this board useless. Sorry for the slight derail.

ODwilly wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

I have one of those, my system also came with a P4 3.2.

The only thing I have done with it was to upgrade it to a P4 3.8 just to see if it would work (3.4 is the fastest officially supported). It worked great.
Its a system I would like to find use for but so far its only collecting dust. I do not have the HP media Drive Bay unit either.

I have the Asus ptgd-la motherboard (came out of one of these hp media centers) and with the latest bios it refuses to boot with a 3.8 p4 😢 it's running a p4 524 which when combined with the lack of a pcie port make this board useless. Sorry for the slight derail.

That is the same board as in my system.
I used another of these boards for my Pentium 4 Windows Vista test run. It did also work great with the P4 3.8 so it must be a BIOS issue. Update the BIOS 😀.

Be sure that you have some airflow over the VRMs when using the 3.8 as the board isnt really meant to run it. If i remember correctly I tried the P4 570 with the HP Media Center and the 670 when I tinkered with Vista so they should both work.

Here is link to the thread where i tinkered with one of these boards, I like them, they seem well built so I actully picked up a third board for ~$7 just a few days ago.
The Pentium 4 Windows Vista experience.

The "better" one is a m7555.dk and it doesn't support C2D processors. There is another version of the same motherboard which does. I've heard of people who flashed the BIOS with the one that does support Conroe but the CPU needs to be modified in order for this to work. It would be quite a performance boost, if I could get rid of that Pentium D.

I remember those cases being a pain in the ass to work inside... 🙁

Half-Saint wrote:

The "better" one is a m7555.dk and it doesn't support C2D processors. There is another version of the same motherboard which does. I've heard of people who flashed the BIOS with the one that does support Conroe but the CPU needs to be modified in order for this to work. It would be quite a performance boost, if I could get rid of that Pentium D.

Do you really need a faster CPU?

The Pentium D 945 is about equal to an E6320 in performance when it comes to gaming.
When it comes to media stuff its about as fast as an E6420.

The CPU should handle Youtube 720P without any problem and if you need 1080P you could always get a video card that supports flash H264 decoding.

That would depend on the Pentium 4 3.8 you got. There's the 570, 570J, 571, 670 and the 672. They're all Prescott differing slightly from each other, but enough to lack support on certain mobos.

filipetolhuizen wrote:

That would depend on the Pentium 4 3.8 you got. There's the 570, 570J, 571, 670 and the 672. They're all Prescott differing slightly from each other, but enough to lack support on certain mobos.

I do not think it matters in this case. All Prescotts should work with the Asus PTGD(1)-LA, both 32bit and 64 bit versions and both with and without virtualization technology.
But only up to 3.6GHz is officially supported. No Cedarmills will work.

The exact CPUs I tried was the Pentium 4 570J SL82U (E0) and the Pentium 4 670 SL7Z3 (N0) and both worked. I think the reason for them not beeing officially supported is their power draw which could make the VRMs overheat. I did not have any stability issues with my boards and the VRMs did at least survive some stability testing.

Other CPUs I know work for sure, the Pentium 4 640 and the Pentium 4 550 as they were the original CPUs for my boards.
I have a third Asus PTGD(1)-LA board now but I have not even checked what model of Prescott if came with yet.

______________________________________________
Release Date: 2006-05-10 Version: 3.28

Description

PTGD-LA/PTGD1-LA/PTGD2-LA Motherboard BIOS update resolves boot issue when HP Photosmart 8250 printer is connected.

Fixes

# Resolves boot issue when HP Photosmart 8250 printer is connected.
# Resolves intermittent issue with resuming from suspend mode.
# Updates processor microcode to support newer Intel CPUs.

Operating System:
Microsoft Windows XP Home
Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition
Microsoft Windows XP Professional
http://ftp.hp.com/pub/softlib/software7/COL15 … 2-1/sp26760.exe
_________________________________________________

My p4 670 sl8py refuses to work with my ptgd-la, maybe there is enough of a difference between it and the ptgd(1)-la that it can not supply enough power?

ODwilly wrote:

My p4 670 sl8py refuses to work with my ptgd-la, maybe there is enough of a difference between it and the ptgd(1)-la that it can not supply enough power?

The SL8PY has R0 stepping the last Prescott stepping, perhaps that is the issue. I have no R0 CPU to try.
Have you updated to the 3.28 BIOS ?

Yep updated the bios to 3.28 and no cigar. Ended up just ordering a 550 for $3 from ebay, later on buy and try an earlier stepping of one of the 6 series chips

The one that I thought had a C2D processor inside actually has a Pentium D 940 or 945. The other one has a P4 as already stated. Didn't realise a Pentium D 945 was equivalent to E6320 and it's good to know. Maybe I'll make it jump through some hoops before deciding what to do with it.