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First post, by sliderider

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Does anyone know offhand if this would be a simple drop in swap or would there need to be changes to the BIOS to support a Prescott? I want to put a 2.8ghz Prescott P4 in a Compaq server that currently has a 2.4ghz Northwood P4 in it. Both chips would be socket 478 and be running with the same FSB speed of 533mhz. I know I would need to get a better CPU fansink for the Prescott because it runs so much hotter.

Reply 1 of 11, by elianda

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If the mainboard does not support Prescott it will not work and you can't fix required hardware features with a simple BIOS update.

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Reply 2 of 11, by Old Thrashbarg

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The Prescott does require BIOS support, and I think some boards also didn't meet the specs for something in the VRM design. Plus it's a Compaq... they're generally pretty inflexible when it comes to CPU upgrades.

Besides, a 2.8 Prescott isn't going to be a huge boost anyway. You'd be better off finding a 3.06/533 Northwood with HT... they're still floating around on eBay, and prices are starting to come down on them as the P4 gets farther out of date.

Reply 3 of 11, by sliderider

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Old Thrashbarg wrote:

The Prescott does require BIOS support, and I think some boards also didn't meet the specs for something in the VRM design. Plus it's a Compaq... they're generally pretty inflexible when it comes to CPU upgrades.

Besides, a 2.8 Prescott isn't going to be a huge boost anyway. You'd be better off finding a 3.06/533 Northwood with HT... they're still floating around on eBay, and prices are starting to come down on them as the P4 gets farther out of date.

Prescott has double the cache memory of Northwood and is about 10% faster at the same clock speed so a 2.8ghz Prescott would be a tiny bit faster than a 3.06ghz Northwood.

What about a Mobile Pentium 4? Stepping SL77R is socket 478, 533mhz bus, HT capable and rated at 3.2ghz. That would be even faster than a desktop 3.06ghz or a Prescott 2.8ghz.

Reply 4 of 11, by Davros

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sliderider wrote:

Prescott has double the cache memory of Northwood and is about 10% faster at the same clock speed so a 2.8ghz Prescott would be a tiny bit faster than a 3.06ghz Northwood.

NO its not
they are roughly the same with the northwood being about 1 - 2 % faster
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1034 … -northwood-2ghz

http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-208-4.htm

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Reply 5 of 11, by elianda

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I'd also say performance is roughly the same, Prescott is even more prone to unoptimised code than Northwood due to its longer pipeline. What you get is SSE3 and CPUs with stock clockrates not available with a Northwood and it keeps your room warm in winter time.

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Reply 6 of 11, by Old Thrashbarg

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What about a Mobile Pentium 4?

Nope. There are very few desktop P4 boards that support Speedstep, and a Compaq board certainly won't. Without speedstep support, a mobile p4 will run at the lowest speed, which on the 3.2 mobile is 1.6ghz IIRC.

Like I said earlier, the 3.06ghz HT Northwood is your best option. Even if the Prescott was faster (and it definitely isn't), it wouldn't really matter much since it is extremely unlikely to work in your motherboard anyway.

Reply 7 of 11, by TheMAN

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if you can fit a prescott 2M, I'd go with that... I swapped a Prescott 3.2ghz chip to a Prescott 2M 640 3.2ghz chip on a Dell GX280... got 64-bit support, now running 64-bit 7... still pretty slow, only a slight improvement from before... you know what they say about polishing turds 😉

best thing to do is just google to see if there are any forum discussions about your particular motherboard or brand name model regarding CPU upgrades... that's what I did before I got my free CPU upgrade 😁

Reply 8 of 11, by sgt76

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Ehem, as an owner of the full Netburst collection- Willamette, Northwood, Prescott and Pentium D, I feel I should chime in:

Clock-for-clock, Prescott is in most benchmarks slightly slower than Northwood- but by a negligible amount. In real world terms, it's a wash between the two. So you'd see the same improvements as going to a 2.8ghz NW.

The 533mhz Prescott might just run on your Compaq board as it has no HT I think. You might need a bios flash, and the cpu might not be correctly identified, but I've heard of such things working. It's the 800mhz HT Prescott that's difficult to find compatible old boards for - due to the HT feature.

Prescotts do run very hot- think somewhere around 20c over a comparable Northwood. One redeeming feature is that at 3.6ghz, the extra cache and high fsb wakes them up and makes them faster than Northwoods. No NW can ever touch 4ghz, which many Prescotts can- though at the price of very high power consumption, heat and attendant cooling requirements.

But a moot point for a server, since you'll not be doing any oc'ing. At stock, a copper core Intel cooler will do the job nicely.

If you got the Pressie for free, I'd say just give it a shot.

Reply 9 of 11, by sliderider

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Davros wrote:
NO its not they are roughly the same with the northwood being about 1 - 2 % faster http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1034 […]
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sliderider wrote:

Prescott has double the cache memory of Northwood and is about 10% faster at the same clock speed so a 2.8ghz Prescott would be a tiny bit faster than a 3.06ghz Northwood.

NO its not
they are roughly the same with the northwood being about 1 - 2 % faster
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1034 … -northwood-2ghz

http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-208-4.htm

You don't read very well, do you? The Inquirer article said they weren't given a Prescott to test because they wouldn't sign Intel's NDA, so where did they get their numbers from? Out of their butt?

Reply 10 of 11, by Davros

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they acquired a prescott from someone other than intel

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Reply 11 of 11, by sliderider

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Davros wrote:

they acquired a prescott from someone other than intel

The chip hadn't been released yet, so how do they get one from anyone other than Intel?