Hello,
Planning purchases and heard about the adapter for dothan cpus. ASUS
says it's compatible only with a small number of asus boards, my
retailer lists a few more.
Asus P4C800 (Bios 1021)
Asus P4C800 Deluxe (Bios 1021)
Asus P4C800-E Deluxe (Bios 1021)
Asus P4P800 (Bios 1021)
Asus P4P800-E (Bios 1007)
Asus P4P800 SE (Bios 1008)
Asus P4P800-VM (Bios 1016)
I was hoping to buy a P4P800-VM and use it as a file server, with
minimal power use and noise.
Any personal experience with all this ? Comments on how the processor
performs in general ?
Thank you.
Lorenzo
I have no personal experience, but if you dig out your search engine,
there have been benchmarks run, both overclocked and non-overclocked.
My overall impression, is the Pentium-M is similar to the Athlon64,
in terms of strengths and weaknesses. On some applications, the P4
eats it for lunch. On others the Pentium-M holds its own. It almost
looks like it might make a good gaming platform, if overclocked
high enough.
Like an AthlonXP, it is memory bandwidth starved. The CT-479 plus
a dual channel 875/865 board, gives you the best infrastructure
for overclocking and getting the best from the processor. One
downside of CT-479, is not all the power saving features of the
processor are supported (it is, after all, a mobile processor on
a desktop chipset). But, compared to using a current generation
855GME chipset, which is limited to FSB400 and DDR333, you can
do much better with the Asus solution. And since the processor
draws no more than about 30-35 watts or so, lack of support for
power saving features isn't a big deal.
Now, you might consider the DFI board, because it has one PCI-X
slot where you could put a good quality controller card. (PCI-X
controllers will be a lot easier to find than PCI Express ones
at this point.) It has a Gigabit LAN chip, so if you wanted to
put an expensive RAID controller in the PCI-X slot, this might
make a nice file server. What I cannot tell you, is how much
compute power is required to run a file server.
DFI 855GME-MGF
http://www.dfi.com.tw/Product/xx_pr....jsp?PRODUCT_ID=3350&CATEGORY_TYPE=MB&SITE=US
Also, for the CT-479, the BIOS situation is a dynamic thing.
There are a few things the reviewers are finding missing, which
could be useful features, such as setting the multiplier or using
higher DRAM ratios (you would think just having dual channel
available would please them). The 1023 BIOS (2005/07/08) for
P4C800-E says "Support CPU multiplier item when using Dothan
533 with CT-479", so some of these things are getting fixed.
http://www.behardware.com/articles/565-3/asustek-ct-479-socket-479-on-socket-478.html
This looks like a good reference - includes mention of P4P800-VM:
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/printthread.php?t=62366
Paul
