Welcome back! Ever wondered whether the new e7205, Granite Bay, chipset is any competition for the i850 and i850e chipsets? Or if the Nforce2 chipset for AMD’s Athlon XP has indeed what it takes to push the Athlon to new heights? And how about a direct comparison, head-to-head, to see what chipset has the best combination of features and performance? We’ll have that subject covered in an upcoming article, where we'll use two Asus motherboards equipped with these chipsets. But there’s more, how about a Pentium 4 running at 4.2GHz clockspeed? Not aircooled of course, but by using a Vapochill PE case and cooling system from Asetek.
Fig 1. A WCPUID screenshot of the 3.06GHz Pentium 4 running at a 4.2GHz clockspeed.
Naturally we weren’t able to do anything at this speed, we were barely able to take a screenshot and save it to disk, as the CPU temperature would rise pretty quickly and cause for the system to crash. We’ve been able to get stable CPU clockspeeds around 3.8GHz out of a 3.06GHz Pentium 4 with the heat spreader removed though. Unfortunately the display of the Vapochill is rather optimistic, indicating a -10C evaporator temperature whereas our CPU-die temperature readout was around 0C, that’s a rather large difference, we’d loved to have -10C CPU-die temperatures as that would've enabled us to push the Pentium 4 just a tad bit further.
