Comparing the B and C P4s

[Fallen Phoenix]

If any of you have seen my post in the motherboard section, I fried my motherboard hardcore. A trace completely burned up off of a capacitor. We're going to try to jumper it but the prognosis isn't good. It looks like I'll be getting an Asus board that supports the 400, 533, and 800mhz fsb. Since I'm moving up from a 1.5gig Willy, I wanna go pretty much balls to the wall (for me at least) and get a P4C around 2.4 gig and then overclock the sucker. I'm not real sure on how the memory and fsb go together and what PC2100 (2700, 3200, etc.) really means. If anyone can explain that or just give some opinions on the B compared to the C Pentium 4 I would really appreciate the insight.

 

[method().man]

The Pentium 4 'B' chips run on on 133 MHz FSB that's quad pumped (sorry for the marketing lingo ...it's Intel's fault!), for an effective FSB of 533 MHz; whereas the 'C' editions run on 200 MHz FSB for an effective bus speed of 800 MHz.

On top of the bus speed advantage the 'C' chips are better because they seem to be considerably better overclockers than their older 'B' brethren. For example, a quick look look these message boards will show that most people who had 2.4 GHz "B" chips were hitting overclocking limits at around 2.8-3.0 GHz with some exceptional chips going slightly beyond. The same 2.4 GHz chip in the "C" form seems to be hitting about 3.1-3.3 on average with 3.4-3.6 being exceptional but not uncommon by any means.

Another difference with the "C" chip is that they run on 1.525 V as opposed to 1.55 V for the "B" chips.

Finally - and this might be important to you depending on the computing you do - the "C" chips feature Hyperthreading (HT) while the "B" and previous iterations of the P4 do not. HT basically makes a virtual chip so that the P4 can take advantage of multithreading (ie, it runs as if it were two CPUs as opposed to one). For most programs, this doesn't really make a differece. But if you tend to run several heavy-crunching programs at the same time, it can considerably speed things up.

As far as the memory goes, don't even concern yourself with anything below PC3200 speeds because if you're getting a 2.4C, then you'll need memory at least that fast. The number following the PC part refers to the theoretical bandwidth of the memory in question (rated in MB/sec). 3200 refers to memory that runs at 200 MHz DDR (effectively 400 MHz); 3500 refers to 216 MHz DDR (432); 3700 goes with 466 MHz; and finally 4000 refers to 500 MHz.