Looking to Put Together a Computer....again

[JackHammer]

OK I'm looking to use the Asus motherboard P5P800 and perhaps the Intel Pentium 4 640 Prescott 800MHz FSB 2MB L2 Cache LGA 775 EM64T Processor. Both of these equipment are of the same chipset (LGA 775). However, the mb only has 1mb of L2 cache while the processor has 2mb. What gives? Are they compatible? Thanks.

[Grimm]

The ammount of cashe doesn't have anything to do with the compattability. That will be determined by the socket type and the CPUs supported by the firmware on the motherboard.

[JackHammer]

Aside from Newegg, what other site(s) are good for buying these components. Cause the CPU supposedly run hot and the Intel fan and and heat sink are suppose to be not sufficient. I want to get the OEM version of the chip but Newegg doesn't seem to have it.

[zero2dash]

I've built a Prescott based system with stock HSF and I have not had any problems with overheating. I've seen people mention how hot Prescotts run and how you need above-stock cooling, but IME that's not necessarily the case...I'm wondering if it's more along the lines of Intel hatred that is getting this information passed around.

Granted, this is on a non-overclocked system...but then again most people know if you plan on overclocking, stock HSF isn't efficient enough.

/stirrin' the pot

[JackHammer]

Oh another question: the motherboard has SATA for the hard drives, can I used regular IDE hard drives on it?

Never mind. Found the answer myself.

[Grimm]

Right now AMD has a definite lead in chip technology. You might want to consider using an AMD rig.

[clutchy]

I'd also suggest what grimm stated, but if you're set on intel i wouldn't worry about cooling. Just get a retail chip, you should be fine. Even w/o adequate cooling i don't think you'd have anything to worry about. People can because a little hysterical when it comes to cooling. I've found it to be the exact opposite, you don't need much at all.

watch out for those OC'ers they're the ones that always need the super power fan systems. I use panaflo 80mm's in my computer they're happily churning along at 1800rpm's not making any noise at all. I had one on my barton when i tried to OC it. That was a mistake... but i never had any issues at stock speeds and voltage.

[JackHammer]

By the way, the chip is a 64 bit chip, does it run regular windows xp or do I need the 64 bit version of the software?

[Grimm]

By the way, the chip is a 64 bit chip, does it run regular windows xp or do I need the 64 bit version of the software?

Either will work, but from what I have heard the 64 bit Windows leaves something to be desired.
You might want to use the regular xp and upgrade to Vista later when it is released.

[JackHammer]

OK when I change out the motherboard and the cpu, do i have to reinstall the os on my primary drive? Will either of my hard drives work without reformatting? I have tons of "personal" stuff in my secondary harddrive and was wondering if I will lose it. Thanks.

[zero2dash]

OK when I change out the motherboard and the cpu, do i have to reinstall the os on my primary drive? Will either of my hard drives work without reformatting? I have tons of "personal" stuff in my secondary harddrive and was wondering if I will lose it. Thanks.

Music collection? j/k man

What exactly are you doing...building a complete computer from scratch, or just getting a new mobo/cpu (and possibly ram if your old ram isn't compatible)...?

If all you're doing is upgrading mobo/cpu, you should be able to just put those in and connect all your old devices (hd, optical drives, video card, etc) and work ok. It's probably recommended that you clean install your OS of choice, but not absolutely necessary. When I owned my 2 older desktop pcs, I clean installed + Ghost'd my primary pc (an Athlon 1.4, 512 megs of ram) and wound up using that Ghost image to reformat/restore my secondary pc (a P3 866 w/ 384 megs of ram). I never had any problems other than upon first boot, XP saying "New Hardware Found" and requiring a reboot. Which, truthfully, is sorta surprising since we're talking about 2 opposite ends of the rainbow here (mobo chipset, processor family, different ram capacity/speed, etc).

If you do clean install, you should only have to do it on your primary (OS) drive, and you can leave your storage drive (secondary hd) alone.

[JackHammer]

Eh music collection...yeah that's it. Nothing but music.

[zero2dash]

I was joking man

[JackHammer]

OK i installed the mb, the cpu, the rams and everything. It goes through bios without any problems. The bios sees the cpu and all attached devices. However, Windows won't boot up. There is a blue screen of death and it then resets itself. I guess I need a clean install of windoze.

[Hoser]

You changed to an entirely different motherboard which has a different chipset from you previous motherboard. This is what's causing your boot up problem.

You could try to boot off your WinXP CD and do a repair and see if that works. I've always done a clean install for every new computer I've built. The only time I didn't was when I used a different motherboard that used the same chipset. WinXP booted perfectly.