Picking a new Northwood P4 478 socket CPU

[acperience7]

I changed from a 478 Northwood 3.0Ghz(SL6WK) to a Prescott3.4Ghz(SL7E6). The Prescott performs horribly compared to the Northwood. I am saving for a new Northwood core, I want to get a 3.2 or 3.4 with/without the 30 capacitors. My original CPU was the SL6WK, and it was fantastic. I am running a Dell 4600i, and the max supported speed is 3.4Ghz. I would really like to get one of the 30 capacitor Northwood's at 3.0Ghz+, as I hear they are "failed" Gallatin cores. I would like to know what the performance will be like versus the regular 12 capacitor models. I won't be overclocking. On a final note: If anyone here has a Northwood(478 preferable), and CPUmark 2.1 please post your score. My Prescott shows a score of 4270.

 

[boogerlad]

why would you even save up money for a new p4? your not going to gain much. You're better off saving it for a new sub 300 buck rig.

 

[acperience7]

I've already put a lot of money into this system, and all I need a new CPU to finish it.

 

[newtekie1]

A 3.4GHz Prescott should outperform a Northwood 3.0GHz. The only way I could think that the Northwood would outperfom the Prescott would be if the Prescott is overheating and throttling more than the Northwood, in that case just fix your cooling.

 

[acperience7]

Everything seems slower now. I know that my games are running worse. The worst case is in Test Drive Unlimited. I used to get 23-45 fps with the 3.0 Northwood. Ever since the 3.4 Prescott has been in it has given 12-23. When I upgraded my GPU, PSU, RAM, and replaced the MotherBoard it went to 12-52 fps with the Prescott. Firefox is running slower too. Surfing on multiple tabs used to be seamless(SL6WK), with the Prescott it usually takes about 1.5 seconds .The things I'm concerned about most are the games, and my Internet browser. That's just the general stuff. I considered the heat issue before I got the Prescott. I have a full copper heatsink rated for 3.4Ghz Prescott CPU's on 478 socket boards, and a temperate controlled 150cfm max Fan.

 

[hat]

Did you reformat? The only time I don't reformat when I change hardware is with power supplies, any 5.25 disc drive, adding a new hard drive, RAM, or a sound card. I would definately reformat with a new CPU, but that's just me.

Did you overclock the northwood in any way? If so it may have been over the 800MHz fsb your current cpu is at now. Intel's processors bottleneck themselves.

 

[acperience7]

No I did not overclock. I haven't found a way to OC my Dell yet. I have reformatted, and reinstalled/inspected the Prescott. I also did a BIOS update from Rev A07(i think), to A12. The new MotherBoard I got shipped with A12's on it. The BIOS update helped the Northwood a bit, but not much. I have only been able to test the Prescott on the A12's.

 

[kwchang007]

I know this sounds stupid, but is your cpu running at full speed? Like have you looked at cpu-z to see if it's running at the right speed because I've seen other threads when people have gone from like 553 fsb cpus to 800 fsb and the 800 fsb one had to be throttled back.

 

[TUngsten]

I don't think there's a need to reformat when swapping CPUs. I've swapped CPUs back and forth a bunch of times without any problems.

Otherwise I'd have to agree with Newtekie and guess that better cooling is needed, or perhaps the HSF wasn't seated as well as possible this time. The prescotts were scorchers. Look for a SL7CH if you can find one, probably the best 478 chip of them all. Of course, however, for the price you'd pay you could get a decent e6300+965 board and quadruple your performance...once you got a PciE GPU

 

[acperience7]

I know this sounds stupid, but is your cpu running at full speed? Like have you looked at cpu-z to see if it's running at the right speed because I've seen other threads when people have gone from like 553 fsb cpus to 800 fsb and the 800 fsb one had to be throttled back.

Both of my CPU's are 800FSB

I don't think there's a need to reformat when swapping CPUs. I've swapped CPUs back and forth a bunch of times without any problems.

Otherwise I'd have to agree with Newtekie and guess that better cooling is needed, or perhaps the HSF wasn't seated as well as possible this time. The prescotts were scorchers. Look for a SL7CH if you can find one, probably the best 478 chip of them all. Of course, however, for the price you'd pay you could get a decent e6300+965 board and quadruple your performance...once you got a PciE GPU

I've tried re-seating it 5 times on 2 different boards. I would love an SL7CH. If i come into some extra cash I'll be getting that, but most likely I'll be stuck with a Northwood variant.

 

[hat]

Meh... download coretemp and run it (from my sig) while running Orthos (also in my sig) cpu test for about 10 minutes and tell us what you see.

 

[acperience7]

Coretemp will not run; "This is not an Intel Core Processor. The program will not continue." I have tired a good number of programs, but the 4600 does not seem to have any temp sensor for the CPU.

 

[hat]

That's weird, as it works on my AMD processor

Try everest..
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4181.html

 

[acperience7]

The only temp sensor that shows up is the HDD. Thanks for the link though, it's a nice program.

 

[keakar]

on many dells the bios sometimes has a default setting not to use hyperthreading so go to bios and turn on hyperthreading and are you absolutely sure that board is rated for a 3.4? many say it will handle up to a 3.4 but the fine print says it cant actually run the 3.4 when i went from 2.8 northwood to the 3.4 prescott it was a hell of an improovement but i went through 4 boards before i found one that could really run it.

bottom line is it may be a bad 3.4 cpu because it should be a lot faster than the northwood

 

[acperience7]

Hyper Threading is enabled. I ran a program called SIW diagnostic and it said that the max supported speed was 3.6Ghz. I had looked around the Dell forums, and only a few people said that they had successfully upgraded to a 3.4 CPU. I pretty much just took a shot in the dark going to 3.4Ghz. I see that many people use 3.2Ghz P4(not 3.4) without problems on Dell 4600's. I thought that if I went over the max supported speed the system would simply not boot past the Bios screen. Are these symptoms of going over the max supported speed?

 

[keakar]

Hyper Threading is enabled. I ran a program called SIW diagnostic and it said that the max supported speed was 3.6Ghz. I had looked around the Dell forums, and only a few people said that they had successfully upgraded to a 3.4 CPU. I pretty much just took a shot in the dark going to 3.4Ghz. I see that many people use 3.2Ghz P4(not 3.4) without problems on Dell 4600's. I thought that if I went over the max supported speed the system would simply not boot past the Bios screen. Are these symptoms of going over the max supported speed?

no it will just run like the spawn of satan is inside it, twilight zone stuff. lol

i tried a soyo, a asus, a ecs, and a foxconn, and they all acted weird and did funny stuff but it was different stuff never the same. as an example the soyo wouldnt let me change any settings in bios and it would sometimes freeze for no reason then be fine again. finally i tried msi and it ran beautifull on it, as you see my specs im using it now. i play fear, call of duty2, quake 4, doom, need for speed, silent hunter 3 & 4 and they run pretty damn good with some slowdowns in frame rates but hey its a p4 prescott! lol

 

[imperialreign]

That's weird, as it works on my AMD processor

that utility is meant to read the core temp. I don't think any of the P4 lineup had a temp diode internally. Intel didn't start doing that until the dual core procs.



anyways - your best bet to check if the CPU is throttling itself would be to try RMClock: http://cpu.rightmark.org/download.shtml If you leave the monitors running, and open a CPU intensive bench/application - you should be able to see the core speeds dropping off as the CPU heats up.

I know my 775 Prescott will throttle itself, and will shut down somewhere over 60C - but, I could never get the throttleing to show up with that utility . . . perhaps you'll have better luck.

 

[acperience7]

I ran Orthos along side RightMark. The Speed was steady between 3391.55-3391.57Ghz for 35 minutes. The Multiplier was also steady at 17.0x. FSB was steady at 199.50.

 

[btarunr]

Nyaah...update your BIOS asap. You'll find the Prescott doing better.

Update your system registry to recognise 1024 KB L2 cache, else L2 won't be used at all. The Windows XP HAL wouldn't recognise the L2 of Socket 478 Prescotts, though it would with the LGA775 Prescott.

If you're a registry-rambo, you'll know how to do it. else download a trial of Systweak Advanced System Optimiser, in its System performance #2 page type in the External cache size as 1024 , save exit, uninstall systweak.

http://www.systweak.com/asov2/

 

[largon]

acperience7,
I hope you have not put more than $300 in the system during the existence of Core2 CPUs. Even the slowest C2D (like E4500) would outperform any P4 with no effort.

Update your system registry to recognise 1024 KB L2 cache, else L2 won't be used at all. The Windows XP HAL wouldn't recognise the L2 of Socket 478 Prescotts, though it would with the LGA775 Prescott.

If you're a registry-maniac, you'll know how to do it. else download a trial of Systweak Advanced System Optimiser, in its System performance #2 page type in the External cache size as 1024 , save exit, uninstall systweak.

http://www.systweak.com/asov2/

http://img.techpowerup.org/071220/tpu933.jpg

That tweak applies only to pre-Pentium II platforms.

 

[btarunr]

nope, it's part of socket 478 Prescott's errata. I don't have a link offhand, will post soon. Win XP's HAL doesn't recognise it as 1024K, rather 512K

 

[newtekie1]

http://www.techzonez.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-5618.html

That post tells you how to go into the registry and check to make sure it is recognizing the L2 Cache correctly. It is worth a look at least, it doesn't hurt to check it to make sure the value is correct.

 

[btarunr]

bullseye!

That's what I was getting to. I'm not a Registry-Rambo so I used the ASO software to fix a friend's s478 Prescott which genuinely had an underutilised cache because the OS was using the older processr.sys driver.

 

[JrRacinFan]

Thank you btarunr! ASO helped me alot also. I enabled 512k and I noticed a little bit better response times from the processor.