jayson said:
One other question: Northwood or Prescott?
P4P800-SE P4P800-E Deluxe
-----------------------+-------------------+--------------------------
ICH5R ICH5R (Same basic main chipset)
+ Promise PDC20378 (Another raid chip)
+ 2 Port Firewire (firewire chip)
AD1985 6-ch sound ALC850 8-ch sound (roughly the same. AD1985
is a bit "muddy" due to
too much reverb in driver.
8 ch sound usually
steals "Aux-in" header
signal for output of
channel 7 and 8, so might
as well be six channel.)
+ vocal POST errors (useful for debugging)
+ optical SPDIF out (both have coax SPDIF out,
deluxe adds optical SPDIF
output)
+ SATA power cable
+ 1 more 80 wire
IDE cable
The Promise chip might come in handy, if you use a lot of
disks. You may or may not like the Firewire chip - check
Google for any problems with that particular kind of Firewire
chip (Via VT6307) versus whatever camera you use with it.
Between Northwood and Prescott, Prescott runs a bit hotter, but
Prescott may overclock a bit further than the Northwood. Choose
Northwood if you plan to run at stock speed, while if you are
planning on pushing the processor into overclock territory,
the Prescott may pay off there. If you check
www.cpudatabase.com
you'll notice the Prescott overclockers use water cooling, while
the Northwood overclockers use air. Whether this is representative
of the better availability of water cooling systems when Prescott
showed up, is hard to say.
(If I was planning on monster overclocks with an S478 processor,
I would choose a P4C800-E Deluxe or a competitors board with
the same 875P chipset. When the CPU clock goes from the normal
200Mhz, to above 250MHz, the 875P won't have video artifacts,
while the 865PE may see artifacts. Do a search on abxzone for
"artifacts" to find out more.)
Xbitlabs has noticed in their testing, that Prescott has a fix for
Hyperthreading, for a performance problem seen in Northwood. There
is a "replay loop" in both processors, and Prescott is a little
more resistant to a certain pathological condition. In normal
use, you may or may not notice any difference either way - some
people like to turn off Hyperthreading anyway, as it isn't always
an advantage.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/netburst-2_18.html
You may want to examine more of the articles on this page:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/
When it comes to any processor selection, you really need to
consider your own application mix (office applications,
gaming, video editing, Photoshop, compression), as the
benchmarks will vary between platforms. Each processor has
different strengths and weaknesses, so the more benchmarks
you examine, the better you'll be prepared for your purchasing
choice.
If you are building a system used mainly for gaming, a high end
Athlon64 would be a better choice. For any other purposes, it is
up to you to read the benchmark articles on Tomshardware,
Anandtech, and the like. There are as many opinions on the
subject, as there are reviewers.
And availability may make a difference too. If you cannot find
Northwoods any more, the choice will be moot.
Paul
