My northwood 3.06

Well I got my Abit IC7, Zalman 7000 and ceramique thermal paste yesterday (along with some case mod stuff) and got my recently inherited 3.06 northwood setup and running.

I ran out of time to mess with getting windows installed and really getting into it to much.

I noticed that my cpu temp was holding right around 45c with the current setup. I'm not sure how that rates for an air cooled P4, but from the little bit of reading I've done it seems that about 60~70c is the safespot so I think that gives me a good range to play with temp wise. Of course that's not under load so we'll see how that changes once we start crunching.

I did briefly jump into the bios cpu settings just to see what my options were in the IC7 and I have to say just like my Abit AMD boards before they really do stack the options in there for the OC'er. I bumped the FSB upto 150 just to see if it'd post (and it did) before I called it a night.

Tonight I'll get Xp installed and start looking at load temps and playing with CPU settings to see how far I can get this thing to go.

Again I appreciate the help in previous posts regarding the chip and where to go with it.. so far everything is looking really sweet.

Welcome to the forums

I would recommend keeping CPU temp under 50C if you can manage it

a zalman 7000 and ceramique should give you MUCH less than 40°C idle... try reseating it, and don't use too much paste... that seems too high

Yeah, I get idle temps in the low 30's. The 3.06HT is a very nice chip. Most will agree that the Northwood architecture is far superior to the Prescott arrangement (20 stage vs. 31 stage Netburst pipeline)
Mine overclocks to 3.633Ghz, but only with >1.6V
Until the Pentium D's are launched I won't be upgrading as these chips can keep up with everything else on the market (Athlon64's not withstanding).

consumer9000 said:

The 3.06HT is a very nice chip. Most will agree that the Northwood architecture is far superior to the Prescott arrangement (20 stage vs. 31 stage Netburst pipeline)

Click to expand...

i guess im not one of the most.

the northwoods were ok for their time but the prescotts can clock much higher to overcome their longer pipeline and the extra 512mb of cache on the prescotts can help with any misses.

most northwoods ive seen tend to crap out around 3.5-3.6ghz and thats right around where the prescotts take over. the majority of presscots ive seen lately can hit between 3.5-3.9ish on decent air which is more than alot of northwoods can do just short of phase and sometimes not even then.

dont get me wrong the 3.06 is a great chip just dont know if id say it was far superior to a standard prescott solution.

SolidxSnake said:

a zalman 7000 and ceramique should give you MUCH less than 40°C idle... try reseating it, and don't use too much paste... that seems too high

Click to expand...

his temps are being read through a calculation across the cpu so theyll show closer to an actual temp than if read by an external probe like what asus or other manufacturers will use. if hes running higher volts and a oc of 3.6 that idle sounds like it would be about right for his motherboard/cooling solution especially if hes just seeing that in the bios as the bios will put your cpu under a load.

your best bet will be to try and keep your temps under 60c preferably under 55c but on an abit board anything under 60c should be just fine.

once you have windows installed and you can install abiteq or another system monitor you can get a better idea of your idle/load temps with a couple versions of prime or f@h going.