Unable to Upgrade CPU with P4VMM2 ver 7.3

It could be that the board (a lot of old and even some new ECS boards) has some dying capacitors in the VRM section, so it can't supply enough current for your more power hungry P4 2.8A processor. It COULD also be the power supply. This usually results in working processor (boots up, runs some programs), but highly unstable.

Also, double check your heatsink to make sure it can dissipate the much higher TDP of the new(old) P4 processor.

Other people who have issues with this board's crappy capacitors experienced sudden deaths:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/154463-30-caps

cant tell if the PC has dying capacitor but this was bought in 2003 and after 4 years of light use my father told me the PC was broke he didnt told me the nature of the problem it was stock in garage for very long until i decided to use some of its working component and i realized that the HDD is the only problem when my father told me he experience frequent BSOD.

ECS is notorious for using crappy capacitors. At a friend's local computer shop a few years ago, MOST of the boards they tossed out from customer machines were ECS, usually with dead capacitors.

On your specific motherboard, a quick Google search reveals a lot of issues with bulging capacitors. Take a look at the capacitors and google the brand/markings on it, you'll find out for yourself if they are reliable or crappy.

When they fail slowly, you'll only experience gradual increases of BSODs, hard freezes and resets, but for some, it was catastrophic. In your case, if it is related to the bad capacitors, your new P4 processor has a higher power consumption, which means it presents a higher load to the VRM circuit. The capacitors are meant to smooth voltage spikes, when they vent (bulge), or become dry, the capacitance drops, and so it can't smooth the power as well. This means that although a lower powered CPU might seem to work (not for long), a higher powered CPU won't work at all, because the voltage swings are way too big and outside of design specifications of that CPU. This COULD be what you are seeing. The newer P4 you have is a Prescott, and one of the higher power consumption P4's ever produced.

If this is your problem, you can try fixing it if you are handy with electronic repair and soldering. But any other wise, I'd just keep the CPUs, RAm, and whatever you want, and recycle the rest. ECS boards usually come with some neat little aluminum heatsinks for chipsets that you can use to cool router CPUs to keep them a lot more stable.

You can try this website to help you identify if the caps are the problem:

http://www.badcaps.net/pages.php?vid=5

The images are on the right side, symptoms listed in the text body.

Is the Bios revision 30703? If not it won't work. You should be able to change the freq & the multiplier. Its been so long since I looked at a 478 I'm not sure anymore.