P4 Compatiblity Question

[Katotonic]

My brother's rig died on him and he's getting rid of his P4 3.4Ghz, socket LGA 775 on a i965 (I believe)

He was going to give it to me as a minor upgrade from my P4 3.0Ghz but I'm on a socket 478 on a i865....is there any way in hell these are compatible? Or am I completely screwed on a cpu upgrade as a 478 owner? (short of a complete overhaul, rest of my rig is pretty good)

 

[Scali2]

478 socket CPUs have been out of production for years. This means that any you still find for sale are usually quite pricy (you may get lucky on Ebay though). And there's no way to fit a 775 CPU on a 478 board.
On the other hand, you can get really cheap socket 775 motherboards, eg from ASrock.
They even have boards that support AGP and DDR memory, making it an excellent upgrade path when you want to re-use most of your old hardware. You can often even fit the latest Core2 processors in such boards, even quadcores.

 

[engiNURD]

What part of his rig died? Is he sure the CPU isn't dead?

Scali2's right, you can't use an LGA775 (pinless cpu) in a socket 478 (holes for cpu pins) board.

I also concur with his suggestion about the AsRock board...

The AsRock 4CoreDual-VSTA or 4CoreDual-SATA2 supports both AGP and PCI-E, as well as DDR and DDR2. AT did some reviews on that board:
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=3024

http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2810
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2813
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.aspx?i=2814

Summary: The board is a good, budget stopgap solution for people who want to get more life out of their DDR and AGP stuff. DDR400 is still fine for today's applications, and only high end NVIDIA graphics cards will be affected by the 4x speed of the 16x sized pci-e slot, but not by much (PCI-E Scaling Review).

$60 - Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2 Socket 775 Via PT880 Pro/PT880 Ultra Chipset DDR2 667Mhz, AGP & PCI-E x16 8-Ch Audio

And if your bro's CPU hand-me-down is too slow for you, pickup an E2160 instead, on the cheap:
$79 - Intel Dual-Core E2160 Allendale 1.8GHz 1MB L2 Cache (review)

 

[Katotonic]

Thanks for the replies, there is however a new development. He is going to ship me his rig at no cost, I just have to figure out what's wrong with it. Apparently when he hits the power button the only thing that happens is a red light comes on and nothing else. We both think his cheap Dell power supply that is now three years old, is dead.

However, he did get a "low battery" warning on his screen which would be the "back up" cell battery in his computer. My guess is the power supply died and that battery took over and eventually died as well.

My question then, can I...or do I need to....replace the cell battery and can there be any damage done to the system as a result of the power and battery supplies?? Guesses welcome!

 

[jackofalltrades]

Try a different psu and if the computer runs and still has a battery error get another they cost less than 5 bucks but your system will start up without it it just won't hold any settings after restarted. You will have to set some of the setting everytime until replaced.

 

[Katotonic]

Try a different psu and if the computer runs and still has a battery error get another they cost less than 5 bucks but your system will start up without it it just won't hold any settings after restarted. You will have to set some of the setting everytime until replaced.

Good deal, thanks for the info. Happen to know if all the batteries are pretty much the same (our computers are listed in the first post for reference) and where I can purchase one? Wally World perhaps?

 

[engiNURD]

It should be your standard coin battery -- open the side of the case to be sure. CR2032 3V lithium-ion. They're typically under $5.