Hi,
Sivasankar Chander wrote:
I'll have to eat humble crow today - I'd earlier claimed that theThis is quite a review. How come you know so much about this
Williamette/Northwood/Prescott P4/Celerons were unsuitable for 24/7
server operation or any other application where thermal stability was
a limiting factor. This included HTPCs (Home-Theatre PCs) running Xine/
Ogle/MythTV/MPlayer etc., either as standalone devices connecting to a
TV/projector or as a component in a Hi-Fi video/audio stack. I had
recommended Coppermine/Tualatin CPUs instead to keep the thermals under
control.
Well, today I found a Northwood Celeron that runs as cool or cooler
than a Coppermine or Tualatin; works in any standard desktop 400FSB P4
motherboard, including the i845/i865/SiS6xx/Via motherboards, and is
significantly quicker than almost any Coppermine or Tualatin when running
media-rich applications, include MPEG/MPEG2 AV decode. This CPU is a
Northwood D1-stepping Celeron. These are sometimes erroneously called
"mobile" Celerons, since they consume very little power and are often
found in notebooks, e.g. Dell Inspirons.
The key interesting feature of the Northwood D1-stepping Celeron is its
ability to run at Vcore as low as 1.25v, as opposed to its standard 1.525v
Vcore. It can assert VID (Voltage ID) encodings corresponding to either
voltage, depending on its internal ACPI/APM state; however, it continues
to run at the full core clock speed even in the lower power state.
The power consumption in each state is not specified; the maximum power
dissipation in the high-power state is specified as ~60W. A quick finger
test on the heatsink (without the fan running) shows that it runs very
cool on average (probably ~10W, which is almost good enough for fanless
applications)!
If you're looking for a cool-running CPU for fanless or HTPC applications
that's also very fast on floating point and runs GNU/Linux flawlessly, I'd
recommend looking for a D1-stepping Northwood - it gives >4k BogoMIPs at about
10W (average), paired with an i845 or i865 for maximum stability. This can
be installed in a Zebronics Pluto (black) ATX case for decent aesthetics.
Avoid the earlier B1- and C1-stepping Northwoods if you can - their thermals
are not as good. The D1s have S-Specs of SL6VR, SL6VS, SL6VT, SL6VU, SL6VV,
SL6W4, SL6ZY, SL72B, SL77S, SL77T, SL77U & SL77V. Not all of them may run
as cool as the one I tested (SL6VV 2.60 GHz/400 FSB/128k L2 cache) - the
average power consumption may vary depending on its process, batch, clock-
multiplier, etc. YMMV - I'd recommend looking for the 2.60 GHz SL6VV or
the 2.80 GHz SL77V, but I could not locate them in the local market - 2.4
is the highest that's available locally (Note: the Celeron D is a
Prescott, which runs significantly hotter than the D1-stepping Northwood,
but probably gives higher performance as well, due to its larger L2 cache).
-Siva
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