"Ken" said:
One more time ... will the Prescott 533 FSB 2.8 MHz with the 1 MB Cache work
on my "old" P4PE MB? Assuming it will, does the P4Pe Bios need to be
updated (Currently @ 1002)? Also, does anybody have a feel on the
performance improvement going from the Northwood 2.53 to the Prescott 2.8?
Thanks.
http://www.asus.com.tw/support/cpusupport/cpusupport.aspx
There are no entries listed with "90nm" mentioned, and there
are also no CeleronD processors listed either. That means no
Prescott processor for that board. Virtually all the entries
are for Northwood.
There are a couple of things that can hold back introduction
of a new processor. One is the Vcore circuit, its voltage
range and current output capabilities. Asus has a fairly
lengthy list of motherboards that support Prescott, and
Asus seems to support both high and low power Prescotts with
their boards. A high power Prescott is around 115W, and that
is likely too much for your board.
The second thing is BIOS, and that is easier to fix. But
even for the "supported" boards, the time from processor
introduction to BIOS fix, is a long one.
You can use the cpusupport web page, to find all motherboards
that support a given CPU. Click "CPU Name" and select the
processor you are interested in, to see what boards can be used
to run a Prescott.
From the "CPU Name" thing, I notice P4PE2-X is listed as
being able to handle a Prescott. Have a look at page 16, where
there is a picture of the motherboard. The Vcore circuit on
that board is redesigned, and uses two high side MOSFETs in
parallel on each phase. That would help handle the higher
current demand. (The P4PE-X/TE rev 2 is also listed, but it
would be virtually impossible to find a picture of that, as
they don't update the picture in the manual when the board is
revved.)
http://www.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/mb/sock478/p4pe2-x/e1569_p4pe2-x.pdf
As for performance, the Prescott has a longer pipeline, and
that is balanced by the larger cache. In other words, the cache
is not a simple bonus - it is helping compensate for a performance
loss when the pipeline contents are tossed. If you need exact
benchmarks, see the review sites like Anandtech or Tomshardware.
Otherwise, a 10% improvement might be a guess, hardly worth wasting
money on if you already own the 2.53GHz processor. For the 10%,
it might be easier to just overclock a bit, assuming the ram can
handle it.
HTH,
Paul
