P4 socket 423 to 478 converter

[Branded]

Anyone know if these work ? They allow you to use newer P4 socket 478 cpus in older socket 423 motherboards.

link

2nd link

Edit: fixed 1st link

 

[Budman]

That's a nice find Branded.

This would be perfect for users with an older board with Rdram wanting to upgrade to a faster cpu.

But the board would need to have a bios that supports Northwood cpus.

 

[Branded]

For what its worth, I called tech support for the first link (nmicropc) and they said you did not need a bios update.
Are you implying that the northwood cpu needs a different bios than the pre-northwood (256k cache) cpus ?
Or do you think that socket 478 cpu needs a different bios than the socket 423 cpus.
It may be that nobody knows yet, because the product is new, and the answer may be different for different motherboards.

 

[paralazarguer]

That'a REALLY bad idea. One of the main reasons for going 478 was that the extra pins were required to provide power to processors above 2 ghz. This adapter won't provide that power. Also, the BIOS won't support northwoods since one won't fit in the board. So, it will not take processors over 2ghz and it won't take northwoods. Basically all it will do is let you put a 478 willamette into a 423 board. WOOOOOO!

 

[paralazarguer]

You do need an updated bios for northwoods absolutely!!!! It has to do with voltage.

 

[Branded]

For you experts out there, I was able to put a 478 pin 1.6a Northwood processor into my socket 423 motherboard and it booted just fine, shows 1.5 v for the cpu like it should, have not tried to overclock. Will test more later.

The converter board is the one I bought from shentech.

 

[MajinVegeta]

The extra pin are for DDR, bios updates should be no problem because my old gateway worked fine with MMX even though MMX wasnt even know about when the board was made and i had never updated the BIOS on that sucker.

 

[jiffylube1024]

I'm gonna sound very jaded when I say this, and I agree that a 478-to-423 socket converter is a good idea (it will be lucrative for the right price), but I think that anyone who bought into Socket 423 made a short-sighted decision and didn't do enough research. Throughout the entire lifespan of the short-lived Socket 423, it was heavily publicised (here at AT and many other hardware sites) that there was going to be a die shring followed by a large speed increase to the P4 as well as other unannounced improvements (which turned out to be the increased cache size, etc). Also, the original P4 (1.3-1.8 GHz) had no real performance increase over the then-current P3/Athlon Tbird platforms, and the RDRAM prices were atrocious at first.

Honestly, I'm surprised there even is a converter for such a changed platform (there have been converters in the past for the Socket 370 platform, but they were to different revisions of a socket with the same # of pins - PPGA CPU's like the original Celeron, then Coppermine cores like the P3 and Celeron II and finally the Tualatin P3/Celeron).

Edit: I just checked out the price of this converter, and $12 is an incredible price! It pisses me off that they can make a converter like this for so cheap, and the Tualatin - FCPGA 1 converters are so damn expensive (probably way easier to make as it's only a voltage change in 2 pins).