celeron board upGrading question

[Tanya]

hello,
can a motherBoard that comes w/ a celeron chip be upgraded to a p4?
if so does anyone know any specifics re: the board (brand etc)
THANKS!

 

[Tony Hill]

hello,
can a motherBoard that comes w/ a celeron chip be upgraded to a p4?
if so does anyone know any specifics re: the board (brand etc)

That's a definite "maybe", it would depend on just what board you've
got.

There are hundreds (thousands?) of boards out there capable of holding
a Celeron, and all except a very few are capable of holding at least
some types of P4 chips.

There are two specs to check out with this board:

1. What bus speed does it support? The Celeron chips use a 400MT/s
bus speed, P4's are available with 400MT/s, 533MT/s and 800MT/s bus
speeds. Higher bus speed, as you might guess, translates to higher
performance, often even more so than the actual clock speed of the
processor (ie a P4 "2.4C GHz" chip running at an 800MT/s bus speed
will almost always be faster than a P4 2.53GHz chip running at a
533MT/s bus speed).

If your motherboard came with any documentation at all it should list
what bus speeds it supports. If not you should be able to look up
this information on the website of the company that made the board.


2. How much power can the board deliver to the processor? This is a
slightly trickier question to answer, and it usually won't be well
documented. Faster processors require more power, and the motherboard
has to be designed to deliver that power to the processor. This is
particularly important for the latest and not-always-greatest revision
of the P4, usually called the "Prescott" (vs. the older "Northwood").
Prescott P4 chips are currently sold with either the letter 'E' or the
letter 'A' after their clock speed, ie a "P4 3.2GHz" chip is a
Northwood while a "P4 3.2E GHz" is a Prescott. While internally these
two revisions of the P4 are VERY different, from an end-user point of
view the only difference is that the Prescott requires more power.


Anyway, as you can probably guess, the simple answer to your question
is "yes, you probably can upgrade that Celeron processor to a P4",
however that leads to the much more complicated question of just which
P4's will work on the board and which ones will not.

 

[Tanya]

That's a definite "maybe", it would depend on just what board you've
got.

There are hundreds (thousands?) of boards out there capable of holding
a Celeron, and all except a very few are capable of holding at least
some types of P4 chips.

There are two specs to check out with this board:

1. What bus speed does it support? The Celeron chips use a 400MT/s
bus speed, P4's are available with 400MT/s, 533MT/s and 800MT/s bus
speeds. Higher bus speed, as you might guess, translates to higher
performance, often even more so than the actual clock speed of the
processor (ie a P4 "2.4C GHz" chip running at an 800MT/s bus speed
will almost always be faster than a P4 2.53GHz chip running at a
533MT/s bus speed).

If your motherboard came with any documentation at all it should list
what bus speeds it supports. If not you should be able to look up
this information on the website of the company that made the board.

2. How much power can the board deliver to the processor? This is a
slightly trickier question to answer, and it usually won't be well
documented. Faster processors require more power, and the motherboard
has to be designed to deliver that power to the processor. This is
particularly important for the latest and not-always-greatest revision
of the P4, usually called the "Prescott" (vs. the older "Northwood").
Prescott P4 chips are currently sold with either the letter 'E' or the
letter 'A' after their clock speed, ie a "P4 3.2GHz" chip is a
Northwood while a "P4 3.2E GHz" is a Prescott. While internally these
two revisions of the P4 are VERY different, from an end-user point of
view the only difference is that the Prescott requires more power.

Anyway, as you can probably guess, the simple answer to your question
is "yes, you probably can upgrade that Celeron processor to a P4",
however that leads to the much more complicated question of just which
P4's will work on the board and which ones will not.

Tony,
many thanks for the reply and all of the info!
greatly appreciated!
sincerely
Tanya