Prescott on AIR

I hooked up a hard drive I had been using as system drive on my Asus P4C800 setup and it booted right into WinXP without a hick-up, plug and play action!



At 1.68v vcore this CPU is putting out a lot of heat and 3.9ghz is pretty much the maximum I could squeeze out of it; It's comparable to the lower end Prescott 2.4 which doesn't come with HT but can get up to 3.6ghz; seeing as the 3.0E is not really "low-end", getting up to 3900Mhz using simple air cooling (no deafening DELTA fan in sight) tells you something about the yield one can get from Intel's latest silicon.


Phase Change Cooling

I'm still using the same old Prometeia.. excuse me, nVentiv Mach I unit as I did one year ago, I'm going to have to refill it pretty soon, but it still has some juice left to do a couple of more benches.



After some initial test runs I ended up with a 4.2 GHz overclock, 300 MHz increase over the Air cooling result, the CPU never goes below 0°C so I guessed this was the end. But wait, there's more...

I reseated the Mach I's head onto the P4 and got better contact then before, at normal speeds the CPU will go below zero but when overclocked it goes to +10-15°C .. IDLE.

Overclocked to where?



At 4.4ghz the system was not stable enough to do any serious benchmarking but dropping it back to 4.3Ghz allowed me to do some gaming sessions at insane speeds (as insane it can get with a Ti4200 of course).

Northwood vs Prescott

While both of these CPU offered plenty of performance when cooled by a Mach I, it were the air cooling tests which caught my eye, where the Northy 3.0GHz stopped at 3.6Ghz, I was running the new Prescott at speeds close to 4ghz, air-cooled! As long as you have enough cooling power in your system and the proper motherboard, you too can reap the higher overclocking benefits of Intel's latest.

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