What's the difference between an Intel P4 Socket 478 1.8 and 1.8A Ghz CPU?

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Wed Mar 13, 2002 8:59 am

Newegg sells them both, and I can't find any literature that explains what the "A" stands for.

DocSilly · Post by **DocSilly** » Wed Mar 13, 2002 10:19 am

Ewww, their P4 CPU list looks funky and is kinda confusing.
Intel uses P4 2.0 for Willamette and P4 2.0A for Northwood CPUs so the P4 1.8A is a Northwood (they have 512KB L2 cache).

wvjohn · Post by **wvjohn** » Wed Mar 13, 2002 10:40 am

and the Northwood is the overclocker - can't remember if it's a smaller die as well - the A chips usually go from 1.6 > ~2.2 using fsb increase

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Wed Mar 13, 2002 5:01 pm

Thanks guys.

Their website was less than helpful when I gave it a quick scan this AM.

Kakarot · Post by **Kakarot** » Wed Mar 13, 2002 5:24 pm

I think the northwood core does use a .13 micron die instead of the .18... last I heard anyway.

Jim Z · Post by **Jim Z** » Wed Mar 13, 2002 5:36 pm

.13 micron copper. The 1.6a is the one to get if you want to O/C.

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Wed Mar 13, 2002 9:06 pm

Nope, my overclocking days are done (except for video). With the exception of my old P3-550 which was ROCK stable at 733Mhz with NO voltage change (and is still running that way on my wife's computer) I'm really not interested in O/Cing my CPU.

My workstation is my bread and butter now and I can't afford to have any issues with lockups or data corruption because of O/Cing.

I haven't decided if I want to upgrade yet - everything runs fine on my P3-1000, but I've got the itch.

I'm looking at the MSI MS-6528 LE with the sexy red mobo. Takes standard 168pin SDram so I can grandfather my current 512Mb of ram.

http://www.msi.com.tw/products/mainboar ... MS-6528+LE

JMan · Post by **JMan** » Wed Mar 13, 2002 9:20 pm

Definitely go with the Northwoods. My recommendation is the Gigabyte GA-IRXP motherboard. It uses DDR SDRAM, but I think the price of the RAM is worth it. However, the SiS 645DX chipset looks very promising, if you're willing to stray outside of Intel chipsets, that is... and knowing your ways, I doubt you are

JMan

grumpy 1 · Post by **grumpy 1** » Thu Mar 14, 2002 7:39 pm

Awesome p4 m/b reveiws here
http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=45000300
and dont forget p4 info here
http://www.emulators.com/secrets.htm#P4MB
http://www.emulators.com/pentium4.htm

cheers

Post by **FlyingPenguin** » Thu Mar 14, 2002 8:15 pm

Cool. Thanks Grumpy!

ShibasScotch · Post by **ShibasScotch** » Thu Mar 14, 2002 10:21 pm

Personally I think that you should go for the Soyo p4FireDragon. http://www.soyo.com
Pump that SDRam to 2700DDR SDRam.

Radboy · Post by **Radboy** » Mon Mar 18, 2002 9:38 pm

Just ordered 1.6a .. $135 at Newegg.

Being hailed as 'the next 300a'

133/533 translates to 2.13 GHz .. with 'rock solid stability'.

forums at asusboards.com have best info.