P4 Northwood 2.53GHz + D850EMV2 Review - By Mark "Frugal" Bush Page 1 of 2
When it comes to putting a gaming system together the CPU is probably the most important component with the video card being a very close second. Each new generation of games puts a little more stress on the cpu. Suddenly that 1.4GHz chip, that was top of the range only a short time ago when you bought it, is starting to struggle a little. Maybe it's time to upgrade, could the Pentium 4 be worth a look? Read on........
The Pentium 4 was first released at the end of 2000. The first P4 chips used the Willamette core at 0.18 micons. The Willamette core took the P4 all the way up to 2.0GHz making Intel the first to reach the 2GHz barrier. The early P4 chips had only 256KB of L2 cache and used a 400MHz Front Side Bus (100MHz Quad Pumped). Intel were able to breach the 2GHz barrier by moving to their 0.13 Micron Northwood core, this also allowed them to increase the L2 cache to 512KB which is good because the lower cache really hurt the performance of the early P4's. The latter revisions of the Northwood have moved up to a 533MHZ Front Side Bus (133MHz Quad Pumped) providing the P4 with up to 4.2GB Bandwidth and clock speeds up to 2.8GHz. No doubt Intel will very soon reach the 3GHz mark (probably by the end of this year).
Intel provided us with a D850EMV2 Motherboard board using the i850E chipset. They also provided us with 256MB of PC 1066 RDRAM. I added another 256MB and a few other bits to give us the following review system.
P4 Northwood 2.53GHz CPU
D850EMV2 motherboard
512MB PC 1066 RDRAM
Saphire Radeon 9700 Pro
Videologic SonicFury
120Gb Western Digital (WD1200JB) ATA-100 (7200rpm, 8MB Cache, 8.5ms) Quiet Drive Technology
Operating System: Windows XP Professional
Pretty much the ultimate gaming system :) I will be looking at all of the elements of this system over several articles, this particular article will concentrate on the CPU and board. The sound card has already been reviewed HERE
First let's take a look at the board
The D850EMV2 supports the following features:
Processor
Support for an Intel® Pentium® 4 processor in a mPGA478 socket 400/533 MHz system data bus
Memory
Two Direct-RDRAM channels (four RIMM* sockets total) PC800 or PC1066 (D850EMVR SKUs only) Support for up to 2 GB of PC800 system memory or up to 1.5 GB of PC1066 system memory
Chipset
Intel® 850E Chipset
I/O Control
SMSC LPC47M142 LPC bus I/O controller
Audio
Audio subsystem for AC 97 processing using the Analog Devices AD1885 codec featuring SoundMAX* with SPX*, or the AD1981B codec featuring SoundMAX* Cadenza* (D850EMVR SKUs only)
Video
AGP connector supporting 1.5 V 4X AGP cards only
Peripheral Interfaces
Up to seven USB 1.1 ports or up to 5 USB 2.0 ports
Two serial ports
One parallel port
Two IDE interfaces with Ultra DMA 33 and ATA-66/100 support
One diskette drive interface
PS/2* keyboard and mouse ports
Expansion Capabilities
Five PCI bus add-in card connectors (SMBus routed to PCI bus connector 2)
The motherboard is a very good quality no frills affair. The bios is very simple with few options for tweaking the system. It is quite newbie friendly because the board auto detected everything and I had no need to go into the bios other than from a reviewing standpoint. Intel are not particularly keen on their chips being overclocked and this is reflected in the fact that there are no overclocking options in the bios. The board is built for performance and reliability, this certainly is not an overclockers board. There are a couple of notable features though, in particular the bios flashing options. The bios can be flashed in Windows using the Express BIOS Update utility, this saves having to hunt for a boot disk whenever a new bios is released. More importantly though the bios has a recovery mode that allows you to recover from a failed flash. You no longer have to hold your breath whenever you flash the bios :). Another feature I liked is the Heat Sink Fan retention mechanism, its simply a matter of aligning the 4 retention clips and pressing the arms into place, gone is the risk of gouging your motherboard with a screwdriver in order to install or remove the fan. On the downside this board came with the worst manual Ive ever received with a new motherboard, very flimsy with only the bareset minimum of info. Not a problem if you are experienced at building PCs but this certainly isnt the board for a beginner to cut his PC building teeth on.
