First post, by Carlos S. M.
I started this thread about Socket 423 for mainly everyone who had experiences with Socket 423 builds and/or share your thoughs, opinions, suggestions, commnets about these systems.
Last monday (13th June), i got a lot of PC parts which in one of them appeared an old ECS P4ITA Socket 423 motherboard with 256 MB PC800 RDRAM (2 sticks + 2 CRIMMs) and the 1.5 Ghz Pentium 4 with the Intel stock cooler for Socket 423. Later, i decided to build a PC with that board, picked two more PC800 RDRAM sticks to upgrade the RAM to 512 MB, i installed everything on the case and installed an old 60 GB HDD, a Geforce 2 MX, USB 2.0 PCI card and a 300 watt PSU. I installed Windows XP and everything works like a charm. CPU-Z missdetects the Socket 423 as "Socket 423 mPGA" when Socket 423 is a larger PGA socket (just called PGA)
Socket 423 systems weren't really that bad, but they were very expensive at the time, mainly because of the only chipset choice (Intel 850) which hardlimited the user to buy more expensive RDRAM untill the Intel 845 was released, another issue was the first Pentium 4s (lower than 1.7 GHz) werren't really competitive against the fastet Pentium III and the Athlon of the time (Pentium III 1 Ghz Coppermine and Athlon 1.2 Ghz Thunderbird) except in some applications and games like Quake III. Also the lack of upgradebility left many socket 423 users in a dead end forcing many users to upgrade the whole plataform to get a faster Pentium 4 (although Socket 423 to 478 existed). I think Socket 423 systems are interesting not only to be unique and becoming rare nowadays (at least in my country/region they are very rare), also for to be the first plataform used for the Pentium 4 and test bed for very early P4s and probably some old ES P4s like the Willamette pased P4 1.x Ghz
Main limitations:
- Only a limited ranged of Pentium 4s are supported (Willamette 1.3-2.0 Ghz), although it could get work with socket 478 FSB 400 Northwoods (and Willamettes as well) via a Socket 423 to 478 adapter
- Very few chipset choices. Mainly the Intel 850 with Rambus or the Intel 845 with PC133 which bottlenecks the Pentium 4, DDR based Socket 423 systems existed, but are very rare
- Limited to USB 1.1, ATA-100, AGP-4x (although 8x doesn't really provide much of an improvement). None of the Socket 423 chipsets supported USB 2.0, ATA-133, SATA and AGP 8x
- RAM choice, mostly Rambus, i845 with SDRAM is still an option, but limits perfomance
There a pic of my motherboard, i'll upload pics of my build later