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I am about to build a PC on this motherboard and am trying to find out
whether anyone has had any problems with this board and Prescott
processors.

Thanks in advance for any information.

Guest

For the people who will be asking this in the future, I have answered
my own question:

Someone on eBay was selling their Prescott because it
woudnt work with their s5101. I found this mentioned
on their auction page for the Prescott when I was
looking for a Prescott for my own s5101!!!

I actually had no idea about any of this before I
bought the board and this was the first I had heard of
it.

I stopped caring because I did some research on
Prescott-Northwood comparisons and found out that the
Prescott will not give you any speed increase in games
and thats the only reason I bought this board anyway.

I banged around a lot of e-mails with Tyan tech
support on this very issue but they still wouldnt tell
me why this is so.

The e-mails I sent to Tyan are actually the reason
that the lack of Prescott support it is now officially
mentioned on their website and I know this for a fact
because the night before I sent my last e-mail to
them, the line on their wesbite stating that 800MHz
Prescotts were not supported, was definitely not
there.

Google has almost no mention of this problem and Toms
Hardware tested this board with a Prescott without any
problems when it first came out so it really boggled
my mind until I talked to the eBay seller for the
Prescott.

Since all Socket478 mobos on the Canterwood (875P)
chipset came out BEFORE the Prescott was released,
they definitely supported the Northwood (already
released) and were SUPPOSED to support the Prescott
when it came out.

However, a few mobo manufacturers recalled support for
the Prescott on their boards after the Prescott was
released because they realised that their boards had
heat-sensitive components (MOSFETS, CAPS, etc) placed
close to the CPU socket.

This placement would have been OK for a 'cool'
processor like the Northwood whose thermal specs were
available when the board was designed, but the
Prescott runs a lot HOTTER and if any of these parts
overheat from the extra heat given off by the CPU as
well as the extra voltage requirements of a Prescott,
they will 'fry' the board completely.

When everyone started using a Prescott in the s5101,
Tyan started getting RMA requests for boards with
cooked components around the CPU. Therefore they
withdrew support for the Prescott on this board and in
a subsequent BIOS flash, they actually wrote code that
will make it shut down if it is booted up with a
Prescott installed.

To get it working with a Prescott, put any 'supported' non-Prescott
CPU into this board and flash it with one of the
earlier BIOSes.

This will give you Prescott support BUT MAKE SURE you
have a separate fan pointed at the components around
the CPU AND you have RAMSINKS on all the capacitors
and mosfets around the CPU.

Even then, I wouldnt try it since these boards are
expensive, hard to find and a lot more solid than the
closest competition, the ASUS P4C800E which has
serious problems with the front USB ports frying the
mobo, which is a whole other issue and something even
mentioned on the Gigabyte website although Tyan has no
mention of it on theirs website. Asus blames it on
Intel's bad designing of the board, but, like I said,
a whole other issue.

Also, this explains why Tyan supports the Extreme Edition and
Northwood, but not the Prescott on this board.

Hope this helps.

mian.atif@rogers.com wrote: