Currently, there are two PRB1 models of the Pentium 4 for Socket 775. These are the 560 and the 550 versions, running at 3.6 and 3.4 GHz respectively.

What Hardware To Use?

Right now, only the two Asus top models P5AD2 (925X) and P5GD2 (915P) can be upgraded with new BIOS versions in order to enable the CPU Lock Free feature. However, as this is an easy to implement feature, we expect other mobo makers to follow Asus' lead soon.

With DDR2 memory, there is the option of running the board at DDR2-400 settings, which will result in an effective memory speed of 266 MHz (DDR2-533) when overclocking the motherboard to FSB1066. However, as we're talking about overclocking, squeezing best performance out of the system should be the goal. Hence DDR2-667 should be the memory to use. Running the P5AD2 in DDR2-533 mode, the effective memory clock will be 355 MHz, which results in a hypothetical DDR2-710 memory specification. While timings need to be reduced in order to hit a 350+ MHZ memory speed, the increased throughput will easily make up for it. See the benchmark section for details.

According to our tests, all Corsair, Crucial and GeIL DDR2-667 memory we received so far is capable of running at over DDR2-700 speeds.

Although it is rather difficult to speak for every single PCI Express graphics card that is or will be commercialized, all graphics cards that run native PCI Express components (ATI X600/X800 and NVIDIA GeForce 6600) should, generally speaking, be capable of running at overclocked PCI Express speeds.

However, please don't blame us if one particular model does hold up. At this early stage we do not recommend overclocking the graphics interface at all. Most popular motherboard manufacturers offer the option to decouple PCI Express from the FSB clock and fix it to run at its specified 100 MHz speed.