Nothing wrong with Northwood! I have very fond memories of my P4 2.6 GHz system back in the day. I had an Asus mainboard (Intel chipset) and a Radeon 9800 and it was awesome for gaming,

Okie, dokie... Part2 is gonna be short. Cause' I've already shown this rig off. But for those who don't know, it's a P4 Prescott rig running a 3.0E on a DFI 865PE motherboard at 3.6ghz. 2gb Kingston ram in dual channel at 384mhz.

Gigabyte Triton- Gigabyte cases are fantastic- better than CM anyday. Look at the finish on that thing (it's a 4 year old case)....

In contrast with the cool running Northwood build earlier, this one runs hot. Load temps are over 70 degrees, but thermal throttling doesn't kick in even at 3.6Ghz- and that's all that counts. Contrary to popular belief Satan doesn't use a Prescott- this is the chip his succubi prefer.


Drives are an 80gb Samsung h/d, Samsung 16x DVD drive and Sony floppy.

Video card is a Palit 6800GS- a very fast clocked 6800GS at 450/1200- way faster than even an Ultra. It's got a huge ass cooler that keeps load temps at 50 something degrees, which is important cause Nvidia 6 series cards had a habit of burning out.

Changes to this rig from the last time, are a new (old) case! 😀 , removal of the aftermarket cooler for a stock Fujikura copper core Intel cooler (good enough for 3.6ghz) and a beefier 400w FSP psu.

DFI IDE/ floppy rounded cables...

This build seems pretty fast for daily use- hyperthreading makes a BIG difference to responsiveness and loads stuff like a dual core. I regulalrly play NFS:MW on this. It handles HL2 and Far Cry at max everything 1280x1024. I've even played some Left4Dead on it when my main rig blew it's PSU last year- laggy but playable.

P4's HT will actually make a lot of apps slower, particularly games. But yes it does improve multitasking smoothness. Core ix HT is improved over that P4 implementation.

I think P4 was a fine chip during the Northwood era. It was at least Athlon XP's equal, had better chipsets, and yeah it wasn't especially hot. Prescott of course is pretty hot but the primary problem was that we didn't have the heatsink selection of today. I'd love to put a Xigmatek 120mm HDT tower or Scythe Ninja on a Prescott.

Pretty sweet builds. I remember not researching the best cpus back around 2002 and just bought a P4 3.0E w/HT for around $220 and a also a Nvidia 5700 Ultra. HL2 was only playable under like DX8.

I wonder what would a P4 3.2C w/HT S478 2GB DDR-400 bottleneck. I was thinking if I could find a cheap 8800GTX or 9800GTX and see how limited the setup would be. I have a 7800GT with 256MB installed but the card is a bit limiting in its own right.

@swaaye

You could build a custom bracket to use the xiggy. I bought a custom one to I could bolt-in for my Phenom II x4 940BE. Works great on temps with IC-7 Diamond paste. Load temps like high 40's. The original clip would keep me in high 50's. Its the original Xiggy 120 HDT tower btw.

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

I wonder what would a P4 3.2C w/HT S478 2GB DDR-400 bottleneck. I was thinking if I could find a cheap 8800GTX or 9800GTX and see how limited the setup would be. I have a 7800GT with 256MB installed but the card is a bit limiting in its own right.

I find my 3.0E holding up the 6800GS. There's a marked difference in fps between running it at 3ghz or 3.6ghz. From my own experience and research, this is about the limit of what a P4 at 3+ ghz can use without extreme bottlenecking, i.e. 6800GT/GS/ Ultra, 7600GT, Radeon 2600, and cards of a similar class.

Tom's did a review a while back- I think in 2008, where they found that an A64 at 2ghz bottlenecked a 3850 AGP. There was no difference between a 3850 and a 2600Xt at that speed. The bottleneck was only alleviated by o/c'ing to 2.6ghz. A64 is about 2x more powerful clock-for-clock compared with Netburst, so yeah a P4 is gonna run out of steam way before that.

You just need to turn on some supersampling AA to switch that bottleneck to the GPU. 😉 NV has some SSAA modes but you need Rivatuner to use them.

Yeah, I suppose turning AA on to shift the load to the GPU would alleviate things a bit for the CPU, but there's not much CPU to begin with in the first place! So it would be a case of the same fps but with more eye candy??

A friend of mine has a s775, 3.0E system with a 9800GTX+ on it, he used to play COD4:MW quite fluidly on it.

Some updates. I got worried about the dinky little cooler on the 4600 Ti and decided to change it to this...

Quite a difference heh? 😁

It's an Evercool Turbo 2 in case anyone's interested and is one of the few newer coolers that still supports the Geforce 4 Ti series.

Dang...never seen such a cooler except on some stock GF7900 series (a friend of mine has such a card)

All I have is a couple of those Zalman horseshoe/flower-like coolers

That looks overkill for GF4Ti

sgt76 wrote:

Okie, dokie... Part2 is gonna be short. Cause' I've already shown this rig off. But for those who don't know, it's a P4 Prescott rig running a 3.0E on a DFI 865PE motherboard at 3.6ghz. 2gb Kingston ram in dual channel at 384mhz.

Damn that's a fine build! Well done 😀

Hmm. I have some Northwood bits lying around, I should hunt down a case and put something together.

IIRC, I have a Gigabyte 8IPE1000 Pro2 with a Northwood 2.4GHz chip in it. 533MHz FSB I think? And I'm pretty sure that motherboard supports dual-channel DDR.

I know I have a Radeon 9800XT to stick on it! 😀

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Damn that's a fine build! Well done 😀

Thanks! Finally, one person that appreciates a fine Prescott! 🤣

SquallStrife wrote:

Hmm. I have some Northwood bits lying around, I should hunt down a case and put something together.

IIRC, I have a Gigabyte 8IPE1000 Pro2 with a Northwood 2.4GHz chip in it. 533MHz FSB I think? And I'm pretty sure that motherboard supports dual-channel DDR.

I know I have a Radeon 9800XT to stick on it! 😀

Go for it. That's a pretty solid board... you should stick an 800fsb Northwood HT in it. There's a big difference between the 533 and 800 chips, on the desktop and in games, apps, etc. With both my rigs clocled at 3ghz, the 800fsb Pressie is about 20% faster in benchies.

But that 9800XT is golden- no arguments bout that.

Well, my current PC is P4 3.00E/2 Gb RAM/Asus P4P800 SE/Radeon X850 PE Agp. Xp Sp3/ME dualboot. For Win9x gaming and internet surfing.
It can run anything without SM 3.0 with excellent quality.
P.S. CPU Cooler is Zalman CNPS9500 LED.

So, I'm the second with the "Prescott is the epic solution" slogan. 😀

sgt76 wrote:

Go for it. That's a pretty solid board... you should stick an 800fsb Northwood HT in it. There's a big difference between the 533 and 800 chips, on the desktop and in games, apps, etc. With both my rigs clocled at 3ghz, the 800fsb Pressie is about 20% faster in benchies.

But that 9800XT is golden- no arguments bout that.

The Preshot is faster clock for clock then the Northwood? I thought it was the other way around 🤣.

And anyway, I second wanting me to build a Northwood rig now! But my P3 Rambus rig will have to be completed first and progress is slow as it's taking turns with a laptop I'm currently reinstalling (along with my other activities).

I'd like to build myself a Willamette rig also but no luck finding such a board locally. Course I could go the easy way and use a s478 Willamette instead 😜

Take note the Prescott has twice the L2 cache and SSE3 instructions as well as some tweaks done here and there.

^Not really sure what the point of doing a socket 423 system would be unless you already have the motherboard for it. Socket 478 gives you a wider variety of CPU, chipset, heatsink/fan and memory options.

GXL750 wrote:

Take note the Prescott has twice the L2 cache and SSE3 instructions as well as some tweaks done here and there.

^Not really sure what the point of doing a socket 423 system would be unless you already have the motherboard for it. Socket 478 gives you a wider variety of CPU, chipset, heatsink/fan and memory options.

Yes, but Preshot also has longer pipelines, making it slower again. The extra cache was basically to compensate for that

Just as with Northwood and Willamette, not all stages have to be used in executing a piece of code. Also, one of the biggest slowdowns with the long pipeline happened in the event of branch predispositions which the Prescott was tuned to have less of.

The Northwood and Prescott kind of run neck and neck in most applications. However, the Prescott does have an edge in certain applications (though the Northwood has an edge in others).

I always wondered why Intel didn't simply make a die schrink of Northwood?

Anyway, and not trying to steal your thread sgt76, but I quickly had a look at what Northwood parts I had laying around. A total of 3 boards, I just took the one with the most memory slots (4 in total), put in the fastest P4 I had (a 3.2Ghz 512kb cache one) and tried to fire her up...and it worked!
I also lack good s478 coolers so an Arctic Cooling all-aluminium HSF had to do.

The CPU was hyperthreading according to the BIOS, also the board supports dual-channel and even has SATA ports?

Not bad for an Intel board. I'll see if I can make a rig out of this thing yet 😁