An early report. — Tim Cole
I posted this in the forum, but for anyone else interested.
With the launch of the northwood core the P4 can finally show some
respectable numbers, albeit with a hefty price tag (don’t forget the days
when a 600MHz Athlon cost $650 though).
To offset the high price of the chip
there are probably some folks out there looking at the DDR option. I was
curious myself so I picked up an Asus P4S333. This board has official
support for PC2700 RAM just now starting to show up. I thought some of you
might be interested in how it fares.
I’m still waiting on a stick of Corsair
PC2700 to show up, so in the mean time I gave it a test drive with a stick
of Crucial PC2100. What I found left me pleasantly surprised.
Attached is
how the board performed at stock speed with conservative RAM timings of CAS
2.5, 3, 3, 6 and a memory ratio of 3/5. Update: Please note that this board can run memory
asychronously; in this case, the CPU is running at 100Mhz and the memory is running at 166Mhz.
If this is any measure of things to
come, we have a lot to look forward to.
After running this board for a
couple of days I noted only one major problem for overclockers. The pci/agp
bus speed cannot be fixed as with several i850 boards. This means the 1/4
divider does not kick in until you reach 133 fsb – which is not likely with
the current batch of “regular” Northwoods.
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