Jade Falcon wrote:

Edit: also anyone know if 423 and 478 heat sink she are crosse compatible in anyway?

They are not.

They seem kinda like how s4 is compared to s7.

I think the s423 platform is interesting. These were by far not as common as s478 stuff.
Kinda like s370 in performance, but the cooling solution is kinda a one-off.

That was my thoughts. I did find that sk604 heatsinks are that same supposedly

Judging by the lack of reply's I'd say that sk423 is a platform mostly lost to time. Witch is no surprise.

After looking into it I found that there are things it has over sk370.

Proper agp v2 4x support, some late sk370 boards have this but not all.
Support for more ram, most sk370 board max out at around 1.5gb~2gb wile most 423 board support 3.5gb~4gb
Most boards have ata100 or 133 wile most sk370 board have ata33 or 66, some late boards have ata100.
Less of a pull on the 5v rail and more on the 12v rail. wile not much of a problem with sk370 systems it does add piece of mind when using newer PSU's
Space heater for the winter. 🤣
Better Mosfet and caps around the fets in a lot of 423 boards.
More overclocking head room with good 423 board over sk370 with a 1.4ghz Piiis in most boards.
Higher FSB witch is good for apps like quake3 and Jedi knight.
No needing to pin mod cpu's with most boards unlike the 1.4ghz Piii-s
And lastly SSE2, not really useful for the CPU's.

As for cons.

Pulls more power and not any faster then late Piii and tbrid Athlons setups.
Not much out there for heatsinks. 604 heatsinks may fit.
RD-ram is not a every day find.
SD-ram boards take a big hit with anything under pc-166. Some SD-ram boards lock ram at PC-100 speeds.
Most good boards are hard to find and most boards are out of Dell/gateways and so on.
No ISA slots, probably not needed but still a con vs sk370.
Most chips max out stable at 2.2ghz without really good cooling and high end boards.

Kind of is like an analogy from socket 4 to 7, but worse.

Everyone knew it was a dead end platform. What made 423 worse was the lack of overclockability from Willamette, lack of overclockability from the Rambus Clock Gens, 12V 4pin requirement (which most people did not have at the time), lack of any official CPU upgrades beyond Willamette (at least Socket 4 had a 133 MHz overdrive), and lack of general performance increase over previous generations except in a few applications.

Also, whats the difference between an Abit BW7 and a TH7? Wasn't aware they had 2 lines of i850 boards.

Also, whats the difference between an Abit BW7 and a TH7? Wasn't aware they had 2 lines of i850 boards.

One is 423 and the other is 478 if I recall.

The BW7 is an i845 chipset with SDRAM. TH7 is s423/i850/RDRAM.

The TH7-II is the one with s478 and RDRAM.

In terms of maximum speed, S370 and S423 are similar. P4 2.0GHz benchmarks roughly the same as a 1.4GHz PIII-S.
They both suck for overclocking. You can typically get around 2.3GHz out of S423, and 1.6GHz out of S370. Although, I've found that PIII-S at 1.6GHz is a bit faster than Willamette even at 2.3GHz. The PIII-S is very FSB limited and responds extremely well to an overclocked FSB. Willamette not as much.

S423 pros:
SSE2 support
More memory bandwidth
More memory support (if you're comparing against i815 on S370).
Better compatibility with modern PSUs.

S370 pros:
Faster raw x87 FPU performance (important for older games, not counting Quake III)
Much lower power draw.
Much wider range of CPUs.
Easier to get boards with ISA support.

Rawrl wrote:

The BW7 is an i845 chipset with SDRAM. TH7 is s423/i850/RDRAM.

The TH7-II is the one with s478 and RDRAM.

Ah... well another reason why S423 was bad was because the cheaper SDRAM + P4-Willamette made terrible performance. Looks like i845 technically supported DDR SDRAM, but Intel decided not to 'enable' the feature until 2002 (past S423's lifetime).

Benching it against i850/RDRAM was not a pretty sight. Quake3A and some SPEC benches in particular.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/The-Next- … 478,419-18.html

Standard Def Steve wrote:

In terms of maximum speed, S370 and S423 are similar. P4 2.0GHz benchmarks roughly the same as a 1.4GHz PIII-S.
They both suck for overclocking. You can typically get around 2.3GHz out of S423, and 1.6GHz out of S370. Although, I've found that PIII-S at 1.6GHz is a bit faster than Willamette even at 2.3GHz. The PIII-S is very FSB limited and responds extremely well to an overclocked FSB. Willamette not as much.

They were similar speed in 2001 timeframe, but as time progresses and SSE2 compiler optimizations more commonplace, the P4 is actually quite a bit faster (which is why P4 aged well against the Athlon XP). As for overclocking, IIRC, S423 rarely hit above 2.2 GHz without excessive voltage. S478 Willamettes do a lot better because of platform improvements (one of the reasons why they moved to S478).

One thing people forget with sdram boards is of-166 ram. Granted it doesn't bridge the gap, but it helps.

dexvx wrote:

They were similar speed in 2001 timeframe, but as time progresses and SSE2 compiler optimizations more commonplace, the P4 is actually quite a bit faster (which is why P4 aged well against the Athlon XP). As for overclocking, IIRC, S423 rarely hit above 2.2 GHz without excessive voltage. S478 Willamettes do a lot better because of platform improvements (one of the reasons why they moved to S478).

Later than that, at least for games. PIII-S and Athlon will run many 2002-2004 games better than a S423 rig. Not that you should be using either platform to play games from 2004.
Then you have extremely cache-constrained games like Doom 3, in which a PIII-S @ 1575 runs circles around a 2.6GHz Celeron (128K Northwood).

Standard Def Steve wrote:

dexvx wrote:

They were similar speed in 2001 timeframe, but as time progresses and SSE2 compiler optimizations more commonplace, the P4 is actually quite a bit faster (which is why P4 aged well against the Athlon XP). As for overclocking, IIRC, S423 rarely hit above 2.2 GHz without excessive voltage. S478 Willamettes do a lot better because of platform improvements (one of the reasons why they moved to S478).

Later than that, at least for games. PIII-S and Athlon will run many 2002-2004 games better than a S423 rig. Not that you should be using either platform to play games from 2004.
Then you have extremely cache-constrained games like Doom 3, in which a PIII-S @ 1575 runs circles around a 2.6GHz Celeron (128K Northwood).

Benchmarks for older hardware is hard to find, but tomshardware has done cpu charts on a annual or bi-annual basis. 2004 era games, with a Willy 1.3 (the slowest one) vs Tualatin 1.2. And of course P4 scaled better than Tualatin. So if we look at the 1.7 Willy results, its even better, most of the times on par with the PR rating of the Athlon XP (Palomino), which was unheard of on release.

Doom 3, the Willy 1.3 beaten by Tualatin 1.2 about even with TBird 1.3
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts … om-III,439.html

Far Cry, the Willy 1.3 even with Tualatin 1.2 and slightly behind TBird 1.33
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts … Farcry,440.html

Q3 Team Arena, Willy 1.3 soundly beating Tualatin 1.2 and slightly edging TBird 1.33
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts … -Arena,448.html

Wolfenstein, Willy 1.3 soundly beating Tualatin 1.2 and beating AXP 1500+
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts … nstein,457.html

UT2004, Willy 1.3 soundly beat by Tualatin 1.2 but even to a TBird 1.3
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts … nstein,457.html

Interesting. I guess it all depends on what you doing.
Personally I like to push systems into newer age brackets. So 423 sounds even funner

I think you can look at the Asus P4T and Abit TH7 as well (Socket 423).

But realistically, you can get a S478 i850 (Asus P4T-E or P4T533, Abit TH7II) and use S478 Willamettes. They come with later steppings and should overclock better.

Well I bought a bw7-raid. After reading the hole sdram thing I sort of regret it. But I'm sure it will be fine for me.

Most of what I'll be doing will be fine even on a 750mhz piii. So a 2ghx Willy would be fine. And with pc166 ram I should bridge the red-ram gap a little. If not I'm sure I can sell the parts and go sk462 or something.

Socket 423, in its relatively limited run, seems to me more appropriate and period-correct for Windows 9x OSes than the next Pentium 4 platforms. Granted, even some 775/P4 boards have 9x drivers, but they are scarce and tend to have such incompatibilities that one needs time and will to get around, and 478 boards were being released for a rather long period of time, covering the XP era a bit more.

I recently got an Altec PC (system builder company in Greece, now defunct) with an Intel D850GB board, a P4 1.7GHz and 128mb of RDRAM; it originally shipped with Windows ME. Might serve as a nice post-370 Win9x box, (hopefully) faster than my i815/1GHz Cumine, still compatible with several late DOS games(?) and well-known Win9x 3D titles. Fun fact: replaced its shot HDD with another one with a rather old WinXP SP2 installation. Even if it was from completely different box, instead of rebooting when loading drivers, it turned out to boot normally, installing whatever it could! After a reboot everything was fine and I could test the machine almost completely! (Might have worked because the old XP installation was from a motherboard with an Intel chipset too.)

So what gpu would you guys pare with a 423 broad? I'd say gf3/4 or a 8500 or 9550?

If I recall correctly, most of the OEM 423 builds I've seen over here were bundled with various flavors of GeForce 2MX cards, so you might want to use something a bit more powerful, such as GF3.

Top tier build from late 2001 - Pentium 4 2.0ghz, 512mb RIMM RAM, GeForce 3.