P4 Northwood

[MaTai2]

Hey all,

I am thinking about building my own PC (I have never done this before) for digital audio recording and studio work. I have heard some good things about the P4 northwood processers. I have to use an intel chip because the program I am using is desinged specifically to use a special type of math or something that intel chips use...whatever I don't understand it, but all of the bbs from my program agree there is a notable difference in the programs performance.

Anyhoo...I don't know how to tell if a chip is a northwood chip, and I have also heard that you can overclock the 1.6 chip. Is this hard to do and is the 1.6 chip even a northwood chip. Can someone help me please because whenever I go to web pages to look up chip prices I never know which ones I am looking for because they don't say northwood by them, they usually just have numbers next to them.

Thx
Matt

[THC]

If the chip is sold as 1.6A, 1.8A etc it is a Northwood chip. Another way to tell is by the amount of L2 cache on the chip. The Northwoods have 512K compared to 256K on the "older" P4s.
The Northwood chips are very overclockable, see the forums at http://www.overclockers.com for more info on this. Get a motherboard that is good for overclocking, my advice is also to get one that many other people have which makes it easier to get help. (Abit TH7II seems to among the more popular, which has the 478 pin socket and runs with Rambus memory).

Good places to buy your new gear is http://www.newegg.com and http://www.googlegear.com

Good luck!!

[MaTai2]

Thanks for the prompt response, I have one quicky though. Is RAMBUS ram the more expensive one vis-a-vis ddr. I don't know too much about ram either, just enough to hurt myself. If that one is the more expensive, could you recommend a fast motherboard for the other type of ram. Thanks

Matt

[THC]

Rambus prices have dropped quite a bit recently while DDR memory has gone up. When I last checked (a week ago) quality Rambus was actually cheaper than quality DDR. Whatever you choose the price difference will not be that much and it seems like Rambus is the way to go to get maximum performance from the P4.

Edit: Forgot to mention that Rambus must be used in pairs