Any Tips On Buying A P4 Cpu?

hey, my old p4 1.5 broke...im looking to buying a new one.

according to the mobos specs, i can have:

Socket 478 for FC-PGA2 Pentium®4
(Willamette/Northwood) 2GHz+

im not quite sure wat that means...is it saying i can have anything above 2 ghz? even like 3 ghz? anything within the 2 ghz - 2.8ghz range? or any cpu thats built on willamette/northwood?

stupid question. i know.

im assuming c1 stepping is the way to go for p4 cpus. because its overclocking friendly? i forgot y.

can anyone also specify the p4s that include c1 stepping? any maybe some websites that show prices for p4s? pricewatch is good, but incase theres more out there, id like to know.

thanx. :D

PriceWatch and PriceGrabber are both excellant places to go first or second, to get a good idea of prices around the board.

Also, what kind of RAM are you using, like 3200 DDR, 2700 DDR....

And, do you live in US or outside?

The stepping number is simply the release version of that particular model. So in theory, a higher stepping number should be better because it implies they found a better way of doing things, or corrected a small bug. I doubt whether it would have any effect on the ability to overclock the chip.

It is also unlikely that you will find anyone selling a particular stepping of a chip - unless there was a known problem the seller would probably neither know nor care what the stepping number is.

Without knowing what your motherboard is, it is virtually impossible to tell you what it will support. The way you have described it suggests it may support processors beyond the 2GHz range, but they weren't available at the time the mobo was produced. It may also be necessary to flash the bios to get it to support faster processors, which could be a problem if you haven't got a processor which runs.

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hey, my old p4 1.5 broke...

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How ?