Cooling/Overclocking

Cooling

Just as you'll need a new motherboard for the 478-pin Pentium 4, you'll also need a new cooling unit. While the heatsink spreader used to cool these chips is the same, the retention mechanism used to mount the heatsink has changed slightly. Fortunately it's gotten a little easier to work with, only requiring pushpins for installation.

Intel's newer 478-pin heatsink on left, older on right

The older heatsink has a copper base

Once you've got the heatsink mounted on top of the CPU, you'll simply use two clips on the fan assembly to secure the cooler into place. Of course, this is the procedure for the reference heatsink Intel provides with retail CPUs; aftermarket coolers use their own unique process. We've received massive coolers from AVC and Glacial Tech that use an entirely different procedure.

AVC cooler on left, Glacial Tech cooler on right

For our tests, we went conducted testing with the reference heatsink that was supplied with our 1.5GHz and 1.7GHz processors, rather than the heatsink Intel supplied with the 2.0GHz chip. Our older heatsink has a copper slug, while the newer reference heatsink (which likely ships with all retail boxed 478-pin processors) doesn't. We're pretty sure other manufacturers are hard at work on their Socket 478 cooling solutions as well.

Pricing

Pentium 4 Prices in 1,000 unit quantities
	7/1/01	8/27/01
Pentium 4 1.3GHz	$193	$133
Pentium 4 1.4GHz	$193	$133
Pentium 4 1.5GHz	$256	$133
Pentium 4 1.6GHz	$294	$163
Pentium 4 1.7GHz	$352	$193
Pentium 4 1.8GHz	$562	$256
Pentium 4 1.9GHz	N/A	$375
Pentium 4 2.0GHz	N/A	$562

With the release of the 2.0GHz Pentium 4, Intel has once again slashed the prices of its processors. As you can see, the 2.0GHz chip now takes the $562 price from the 1.8GHz Pentium 4, which falls to $256. Meanwhile, the 1.9GHz P4 launches at $375 -- 33% less than the top-of-the-line chip. At $193 the Pentium 4 1.7GHz represents the best value out of the lineup, although the 1.8GHz P4 at $256 is extremely tempting.

As indicated by their pricing, Intel is phasing out the 1.3GHz and 1.4GHz parts, and the 1.5GHz chip is priced very competitively.

Overclocking

With its SoftMenu III interface, ABIT's TH7II-RAID is the most powerful P4 overclocking board currently available on the market. You see, while previous P4 motherboards supported bus speeds up to 156MHz in small increments of two or three MHz, the TH7II-RAID supports bus speeds from 100-255MHz in 1MHz increments. For overclocking, both the AGP bus and memory bus multipliers can be adjusted, just in case your RAM or video card aren't able to run at the higher bus speeds this board is capable of. Finally, voltages in excess of 2.0V are available, although we were too nervous to go that high. Call us wusses, but we were in no mood to fry our shiny new P4.

When push came to shove we topped out at a clock speed of 2,240MHz via a front-side bus speed of 140MHz (effectively 560MHz) with the clock multiplier set at 16.0 and the core voltage at 1.95V. Anything higher would have required more cooling and/or more voltage to run stable.