Ah yes, we sure do love stories like this here on ProRetroPC. The biggest underdog in the industry of Personal Computers – Socket 423. Lifespan of roughly two years and miserable performance are the highlights of this platform. But is there more than it meets the eye ? Of course !
But let`s start from the beginning, I have the Tualatin shining start – Pentium III 1400-S. This CPU paired with Asus TUSL2-C board should be a good comparison setup for Asus P4T and it`s top CPU – Willamette Pentium 4 2.0 processor. Since they came from the same period of time, results may be interesting. Tualatin is the swan song of an old P6 architecture (first CPU from this family was Pentium PRO !), and Willamette is the first son of the most ground breaking Intel architectures of them all – NetBurst. It laid a foundation for over five years of innovation, three different sockets and introduced private consumers to multi-thread processing units. On paper, Pentium 4 should crush old contender with it`s base frequency, quad pumped 400 MHz FSB, brand new RDRAM and of course new northbridge – i850 chip. The results will be presented soon on Retro Builds section.
This platform also introduced brand new, additional P4 ( I wonder where the name came from ? 😉 ) power socket and AGP Pro port. I must confess, it was my first encounter with this platform and I find it simply astonishing. You can feel the halo of a brand and brave new world coming upon PC industry. CPU cooler mount is something amazing compared to Socket 370. It`s very easy to work with and opposed to what you can find on the internet, seems to be very durable and tough. Fortunately my cooler is brand new, so the user experience was as best as possible 🙂 I was collecting parts for this build for over a year, now I`m waiting for new PC800 ECC RDRAM with total capacity of 2 GB. Amount reserved for servers section right there.
Unfortunately, AGP Pro found it`s application only for Nvidia Quadro and ATI Fire GL cards. What a shame, I would love to run this board with some Geforce 3 AGP Pro monster 😉 But we can`t turn the tides of time, I have a few NV20 cards that will fit this spot perfectly. All in all, this test looks really interesting, stay tuned 🙂
