I think the time is right to upgrade my main machine. The latest crop of Pentium 4s - the 600 series - feature a larger (2 MB) L2 cache, 64-bit extensions and use SpeedStep technology to minimize power draw under low load conditions. The thermal profile is similar, or better, to the 500 series. Dual core P4s are expected later this year, but the initial offerrings won't have hyperthreading. I figure it'll take a year or so to work the kinks out, given Intel's history of heat problems. The promise of BTX doesn't seem to be on the horizon, either. Is anyone besides Intel making BTX motherboards?? We might not even need the thermal features of BTX, now that we have the P4 600s.
The 3.2 GHz P4 seems to be sweet spot between price, performance and stability. It's a lot cheaper than the 3.4 GHz P4, and 3.4 GHz has traditionally been the threshold at which heat problems appear.
My goal is to build a near-silent machine. Most computer noise comes from fans - the case fans, the power supply fan, the CPU fan, the motherboard fan and the video card fan. That's a lot of fans, all of which tend to get noisier over time. My setup will employ an acoustically-insulated case (probably a Lian Li) with a single low-speed (a.k.a. low noise) 120mm fan, an Antec Phantom 350 fanless power supply, a fanless motherboard (probably an Asus P5GDC-V) with integrated video and a Thermaltake Silent775 CPU cooler. This, coupled with two quiet SATA hard drives - either Seagate Barracudas or Samsung SpinPoints, should give me just about the quietest top-of-the-line machine possible.
The only thing I'm waiting for is widespread availability of the 600 series P4s. They (supposedly) only work in mobos which specifically support 64-bit extensions (EMT64). Most socket 775 mobos were released well ahead of the P4 600s, and only support EMT64 in their latest BIOS revisions. I need to wait until I can buy a mobo that's guaranteed to have the latest BIOS, or better yet, a guaranteed-to-work mobo/CPU combo.
In the mean time, I'll continue to make do with my trusty 2.6 GHz P4 that's getting noisier by the week. Going from 2.6 GHz to 3.2 GHz might not seem like than much of a jump, but when you consider the extra L2 cache, DDR2 RAM (and the accompanying faster RAM timings), Matrix RAID and big power savings, it should add up to quite a boost. Plus, the new machine will assume the meager duties of my server. There's really no justification for that old thing sitting in the basement, sucking down electricity and making more noise than the furnace.
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