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Best mobo for P4 Prescott

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First post, by buckeye

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Found a 3ghz P4 Prescott in my "junk box" and now have the urge to build an xp game rig around it. Can anyone recommend some good 478 socket mobo's that stand out from the rest?

Asus P5N-E Intel Core 2 Duo 3.33ghz. 4GB DDR2 Geforce 470 1GB SB X-Fi Titanium 650W XP SP3
Intel SE440BX P3 450 256MB 80GB SSD Radeon 7200 64mb SB 32pnp 350W 98SE
MSI x570 Gaming Pro Carbon Ryzen 3700x 32GB DDR4 Zotac RTX 3070 8GB WD Black 1TB 850W

Reply 2 of 46, by Skyscraper

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Not MSI, they tend to burn.

Asus 875P/865PE boards are nice if you are overclocking but keep a look at the VRM MOSFETs as they get really hot.

If you are not overclocking something like an Intel D865perl or Fujitsu Siemens D1627 probably would be best as these boards usually are cheaper than the Asus/Abit/DFI/OMG boards and at least as high quality.

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Reply 3 of 46, by buckeye

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Forgot to mention it's going to be run at stock speed, no overclocking.

Asus P5N-E Intel Core 2 Duo 3.33ghz. 4GB DDR2 Geforce 470 1GB SB X-Fi Titanium 650W XP SP3
Intel SE440BX P3 450 256MB 80GB SSD Radeon 7200 64mb SB 32pnp 350W 98SE
MSI x570 Gaming Pro Carbon Ryzen 3700x 32GB DDR4 Zotac RTX 3070 8GB WD Black 1TB 850W

Reply 4 of 46, by F2bnp

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Get an Intel 865 or 875 board then. I've had about 5-6 ASUS boards die on me due to bad capacitors, all from the same era. I loved these boards, but fuck ASUS, unless you've got soldering skills and wanna work on fixing them.

Reply 5 of 46, by zyga64

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I have had Abit IC7 back in time, and I remember it as rock solid and good performer.

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Reply 6 of 46, by gdjacobs

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buckeye wrote:

Found a 3ghz P4 Prescott in my "junk box" and now have the urge to build an xp game rig around it. Can anyone recommend some good 478 socket mobo's that stand out from the rest?

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Reply 7 of 46, by PhilsComputerLab

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I found that it should matter too much what 875P/865PE board. Do check the capacitors though.

AGP does limit your graphics options a little bit though, so I'm lately leaning more towards going with socket 775 for a Windows XP Pentium 4 machine.

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Reply 8 of 46, by kanecvr

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Asus i865 socket 478 boards suffer from "sudden inexplicable death syndrome" I have like 5-6 dead boards in my parts box. Performance on their boards is unremarkable, with the exception of the P4C800 Deluxe witch is pretty fast. As for MSI - as much as I love their current boards, socket 478 and early LGA775 boards made by them are crap, with a few rare exceptions. The NEO2 series is fast but not reliable (VRM's tend to POP when used with fast CPUs). They're only reliable board is the NEO-FISR2. Good OC features too, but useless when your board pops a VRM. As reliability and performance go, Gigabyte boards are hit and miss, but feature wise the're unremarkable.

As for all retro rigs, I recommend ABIT boards. Look for an ABIT IS7, IC7 or AI7 - you can't go wrong with those. Great features, reliability and performance.

Reply 9 of 46, by shamino

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I've gotten the impression that mPGA478 motherboards generally have a hard time with safely handling the power load of Prescotts. The mosfets get very hot when running them, some boards are known for catastrophic failures with them (MSI), and Dell released a BIOS patch for some (all?) of their boards that forced an underclock of Prescotts faster than 3.0GHz. It seems that for some reason the industry underestimated the requirements imposed by those CPUs.
I don't have a specific board to recommend, I'm interested in the answer myself. But I think the VRM section's current capacity and the quality of it's cooling is the most serious consideration. The VRM is under much more stress with a Prescott than it is with a Northwood.

Reply 10 of 46, by stuvize

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shamino wrote:

I've gotten the impression that mPGA478 motherboards generally have a hard time with safely handling the power load of Prescotts. The mosfets get very hot when running them, some boards are known for catastrophic failures with them (MSI), and Dell released a BIOS patch for some (all?) of their boards that forced an underclock of Prescotts faster than 3.0GHz. It seems that for some reason the industry underestimated the requirements imposed by those CPUs.
I don't have a specific board to recommend, I'm interested in the answer myself. But I think the VRM section's current capacity and the quality of it's cooling is the most serious consideration. The VRM is under much more stress with a Prescott than it is with a Northwood.

Same reason some 478 motherboards would not support Gallatin P4s even with a bios update the boards where just not designed for a CPU with that high of a TDP. Dell put heatsinks on the VRMs of many of their late 478 boards most likely to accommodate the power load of Prescotts

Reply 11 of 46, by TELVM

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shamino wrote:

I've gotten the impression that mPGA478 motherboards generally have a hard time with safely handling the power load of Prescotts. The mosfets get very hot when running them, some boards are known for catastrophic failures with them (MSI), and Dell released a BIOS patch for some (all?) of their boards that forced an underclock of Prescotts faster than 3.0GHz. It seems that for some reason the industry underestimated the requirements imposed by those CPUs.
I don't have a specific board to recommend, I'm interested in the answer myself. But I think the VRM section's current capacity and the quality of it's cooling is the most serious consideration. The VRM is under much more stress with a Prescott than it is with a Northwood.

^ Wholly agreed. 😵

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Reply 12 of 46, by buckeye

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PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I found that it should matter too much what 875P/865PE board. Do check the capacitors though.

AGP does limit your graphics options a little bit though, so I'm lately leaning more towards going with socket 775 for a Windows XP Pentium 4 machine.

Think I will check into a 775 set up, I just found the Prescott lying around but now recall it came out of a system struck by lightning so it's probably for naught anyhow. Thanks for the input everybody!

Asus P5N-E Intel Core 2 Duo 3.33ghz. 4GB DDR2 Geforce 470 1GB SB X-Fi Titanium 650W XP SP3
Intel SE440BX P3 450 256MB 80GB SSD Radeon 7200 64mb SB 32pnp 350W 98SE
MSI x570 Gaming Pro Carbon Ryzen 3700x 32GB DDR4 Zotac RTX 3070 8GB WD Black 1TB 850W

Reply 13 of 46, by PcBytes

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kanecvr wrote:

Asus i865 socket 478 boards suffer from "sudden inexplicable death syndrome" I have like 5-6 dead boards in my parts box. Performance on their boards is unremarkable, with the exception of the P4C800 Deluxe witch is pretty fast. As for MSI - as much as I love their current boards, socket 478 and early LGA775 boards made by them are crap, with a few rare exceptions. The NEO2 series is fast but not reliable (VRM's tend to POP when used with fast CPUs). They're only reliable board is the NEO-FISR2. Good OC features too, but useless when your board pops a VRM. As reliability and performance go, Gigabyte boards are hit and miss, but feature wise the're unremarkable.

As for all retro rigs, I recommend ABIT boards. Look for an ABIT IS7, IC7 or AI7 - you can't go wrong with those. Great features, reliability and performance.

MSI 865PE Neo2-L boards don't pop VRMs. At least my old one came with a P4 3.0GHz HT Prescott,and it was sure fun. VRMs weren't even hot. It was quite poorly recapped (few original OST caps still there,but two of them were replaced by Samwha RDs.) and I had to remove one or two popped Nichicons. Other than that,it was rock stable. One little quirk was it couldn't save CMOS,but I blame myself for not having a CR2032 battery handy. I had a breadboard system built out of it when I went on a trip (all the parts,except the PSU which I put somewhere else,were put into a briefcase.

Here are the specs of what it consisted of:

MSI 865PE Neo2-L
Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz 478
Radeon HD3450 512MB GPU - pretty fitting with the red theme 🤣
FSP FSP300-60GTP PSU - recapped too,bulging 5vsb cap and a few ones also bulging on the secondary - it worked fine afterwards.
80GB WDC WD800JB-60LSA5 SATA HDD
TSSTCorp/HP TS-H492C DVD-ROM
512MB RAM - not really sure,I think I had more but I could be wrong
Ubuntu 14.04 LTS/Windows 7 Ultimate dualboot
no case.

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Reply 14 of 46, by Stermy57

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Asus p4c800 has bad vrm mosfet... There are a lor of problema with them.
Asus p4p800 has better vrm. If i were you, i would buy an abit 478 865 or 875
There are more stable

Reply 15 of 46, by vlask

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PhilsComputerLab wrote:

I found that it should matter too much what 875P/865PE board. Do check the capacitors though.

AGP does limit your graphics options a little bit though, so I'm lately leaning more towards going with socket 775 for a Windows XP Pentium 4 machine.

Asrock as always have solution for almost everything. Why not use PCI-E and DDR2 memories? 😀

http://asrock.com/mb/Intel/P4i945GC/

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Reply 16 of 46, by PhilsComputerLab

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vlask wrote:

Asrock as always have solution for almost everything. Why not use PCI-E and DDR2 memories? 😀

http://asrock.com/mb/Intel/P4i945GC/

Good old Asrock! They made some of the coolest hybrid boards that's for sure!

Still, once you go socket 775 and PCIe, I'd just go with a newer chipset like 915 or 945, 975. What is cool is that you can run pretty much all the Pentium, Pentium D CPUs in newer P35 motherboards. Do check the CPU support page though, not every board does this.

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Reply 17 of 46, by tayyare

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Intel 865PE boards are rock solid and goes forever, as far as I'm concerned. Full official and still available online driver/manual support for Windows 98 is also a plus (at least for me).

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Reply 18 of 46, by brostenen

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PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Good old Asrock! They made some of the coolest hybrid boards that's for sure!

Yeah... Mostly for XP install's, though they did make boards with both PCI-E and AGP slots. And boards with other strange stuff...

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Reply 19 of 46, by Sutekh94

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ASRock definitely did make some interesting boards... I still remember a socket A board they made one time that had a slot for a socket 754 processor upgrade card.

And yeah, I'd also recommend 775 stuff if you're wanting to do a Prescott build. I've had some rather interesting experiences with my 3.2GHz 478 Prescott in the past.

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