Prescott Ready Motherboards?

[davehries]

Can you tell me which motherboards are really able to handle the Intel P4E CPUs?

It is my understanding that many motherboards mfg say that their boards are "Prescott Ready", while in truth they have only tweaked the BIOS. To be really able to handle the power requirements of the P4E chip, the mfg needs to up-grade the motherboard itself.

I want to build a new system and I want to use the E chip. If the motherboard is really designed the the Prescott, the heat issue is no worse than the AMD64 chips. Do you know which boards are designed for the P4E?

Thanks.

 

[leukotriene]

Any motherboard with a 775 contact CPU socket is designed exclusively for Prescott.

Or are you wondering what socket 478 boards are capable of accommodate Prescott?

If the motherboard is really designed the the Prescott, the heat issue is no worse than the AMD64 chips.

No.
The motherboard has little effect on the absolute temperature of the CPU under load, all things being equal. What it does affect is the measured temperature due to differences in calibration, diode placement, and the allowable deviation inherent in the diode itself. This is an important issue for athlon XP motherboards that do not use the AXP internal diode.

The same processor running at the same voltage with the same amperage draw will produce effectively identical amounts of heat.

The absolute voltage being given to the processor can and does vary from board to board at the same settings (that is, one Asus board can put out 1.73 when you indicate 1.70, and another board can put out 1.68 under the same situation), but this is not in any way due to the socket design.

I've not seen an Athlon64 hit anywhere near what a first stepping high-clocked Prescott can easily pull (70+ Celsius) without considerable overvolting. The A64 is a relatively mellow chip (particularly compared to high clocked thunderbird and first revision thoroughbred core AXP processors, and of course Prescott A) in terms of temps, impressively so in the situation where Cool'N'Quiet is supported and turned on.

 

[E4g1e]

It is my understanding that many motherboards mfg say that their boards are "Prescott Ready", while in truth they have only tweaked the BIOS. To be really able to handle the power requirements of the P4E chip, the mfg needs to up-grade the motherboard itself.

Actually, some motherboard makers have put out different board revisions of the same motherboard, whereas later revisions come with the necessary regulators and transformers onboard to handle the Prescott CPUs. It is true that many motherboard makers have only tweaked the BIOS to handle Prescott - but in the case of the better brands that only needed BIOS tweaking (such as Asus), they've built the motherboards with larger capacitors/regulators/transformers than what the original i865PE and i875P reference motherboards had used to begin with. (No wonder why the very first Asus P4C800-E Deluxe motherboard ever made can support the Prescott CPU with a flash BIOS update.) Intel, on the other hand, had pretty much stuck with the original reference design on early board revisions (early AA numbers), and had only upgraded the parts on later AA revisions.