Can I plug a Pentium III on a Pentium IV motherboard?

[Guest_imported]

Hello,

I have a Pentium III 500 based system, but I bought a 40 Gb U-100 IDE Hard Disk that cannot run on this motherboard due to the new U-100 transfer protocol (yes I was dumb). Now I want to buy a U-100 compatible motherboard, but not a new chip, becouse the Pentium IV prices should drop in a few weeks...do you know if it's possible to plug my old chip in the new motherboard or the new socket doesn't accept older versions of Pentium?

Thanks very much in advance from Spain...

 

[Karl Blessing]

Nope, not at all. The Pentium IV is a whole new chip, with alot larger number of pins, and a FSB of 400Mhtz (even if you managed to get the Pent3 into the socket, the FSB alone would blow up your P3)

thats the thing about the newer technologies now days, it's becomming more and more apparent, that everytime there is a new CPU or new mobo, you often have to get the "vice Versa" all over again too.

if you are not using RDRams , and just using Sdrams, and considering upgrading, I would strongly recomend looking into a TBird 266FSB and a board that supports the 266FSB, since they can support SDram (and depending on the board you get, you can also get a board that supports both sdram and ddr rams, and upgrade to ddr in the future)
Keep in mind, I am an AMD supporter, so I Can tend to be more bias towards it, but I dont think that getting a P4 at the moment justifies it's price. (by price I mean overall price, like needing to get Rdrams, needing to get a new power supply, yes thats right, your existing power supply will not work with it.)

now, Intel is making a new chipset pretty soon, I Dont know how soon, but it's going to be able to support SDrams for Pent4, the only problem is, since the Pent4 relys heavily on Front Side Bus, having a higher artitecure rams (this is where Rdrams, actually sheds some light, because it was pointless on a PC100/PC133 system) such as RDRam, or DDR ram, will actually give it the performance boost it needs over the competitors, a P4 on the same speed or type of rams as an AMD Tbird (PC100/PC133) is much lower than amd's (the way they did this comparism, was underclocking the FSB to match that of the AMD counterpart)

Also , I wouldnt get too hyped up about the DDRram support on AMD Boards either, becaust at the moment, the DDR Rams only show a 5% - 10% increase in performance over PC133 (it's going through the same situation as Rdram had in the past, the board's transfer speed has to be faster, to actually see the benefit of the higher bandwidth rams)

I hope this helped a little better than a simple "no you cant plug a P3 into a P4 board" But keep in mind if you get the board, you also need to get

P4 Chip (Duh)
RDram (if you dont have some already)
A new Power Supply (for the special 12V connector thats required for P4 boards)

Karl Blessing aka kb244{fastHACK}