I’ve been a die hard fan of Intel for quite some time, only buying Intel processors and Intel motherboards … I never had a problem and the boxes were rock solid stable.
My last purchase of Intel was a D850MVL motherboard, with the rambus … I bought it shortly after the 400mhz fsb pentium 4’s were released, and with 800mHz ram, I figured I would be safe for a while. Not having a huge budget, I went with the 1.6 ghz P4… Figuring the new mPGA 478 socket would be around a while, and I could drop in a new proc in a year or two. Well, I was partly right. The mPGA 478 is still around, but Intel changed things … the 478 of today won’t work in 478 boards of yesterday. The new 2.4 and 2.8g cpu’s are available in 478 package, but they’re all 533 mhz fsb, which my 850mvl won’t handle.
So, feeling burned by Intel, I figured I would try AMD.
I settled on an ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard and the Athlon XP 2600M mobile cpu.
The build was nothing special. I tried to buy some performance parts, hoping to overclock, but resulted with limited success, due in part to the a7n8x’s reluctance to go over 200 on the fsb or over 13.5 on the multiplier.
I tried a air duct system for delivering cool air to my cpu … but it didn’t work so well – the cpu temps were virtually the same with or without the duct… you can see my purple mushkin level 2 black ram, which is actually purple… the ram is rated at PC3500
for more extreme cooling, and that good old jet engine effect, I installed a PAIR of vantec tornado 80mm screamer fans in the chassis. The moved an extreme amount of air, and generated an extreme amount of noise … cpu temps were effected by a few degrees with them on versus off.
The cases I used are CODEGEN mini-server cases… they are very spacious and easy to work with. My P4 lived in one, and my P3 in another. When I performed the AMD upgrade on the P4, the p3 got the boot. I dissambled the P4 to clean its heatsink as well as reapply some thermal paste.
Here’s the finished product… I’m not sure if that is the P4 or the AMD, like I said, the cases are identical!
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