This quick article is not meant to scare the enthusiast away from the newer Prescott CPUs from Intel, but when you see a company like Microstar, that has traditionally stood behind enthusiast computing ways, you have to ask yourself just how safe Prescott CPU overclocking is.
Back only a couple of short weeks ago, we showed you guys our Prescott CPU overclocking results. While we did end up getting some fairly nice overclocks that many of us would be happy with, they did seemed to be gained at what could certainly be a long-term price. To the point, we saw incredible temperatures generated by the CPUs and the motherboards as well. We showed you reasons why we thought the motherboards could be in jeopardy. When your motherboard is getting hot enough to melt plastic while supplying the needed power to your CPU, you have to wonder how long a duration your equipment can keep that up. If all of this is new to you, please check out the article linked above as it shows you some of the extremes we ran up against.
One of the board manufacturers that we showcased in that article was Microstar, better known now days as MSI. We used their 865PE NEO2 motherboard in our Prescott overclocking testing. One loyal HardOCP reader, Eric Seckinger, saw our results and purchased this same motherboard, and of course flashed it to the most recently released BIOS at that time. This was of course a week or so after our article was published and in the MSI had released a new BIOS that specifically supported Prescott CPUs. Much to our surprise and to Eric’s, his motherboard no longer supported Vcore changes. That is correct, he was not able to adjust the core voltage supplied to the CPU, which is of course of the utmost importance when overclocking a CPU. Surely this must be a mistake. A bit of checking found this statement on MSI website at the bottom of this page.
The 865PE Neo2-P Platinum Edition is designed to support the Intel(r) next generation Pentium 4(r) processor: Prescott. However, owing to the different manufacturing process and power management, we've made some voltage limits in the BIOS to protect the Prescott P4 CPU from burning out. Meanwhile, you'll also find that there is no CPU voltage settings to adjust. This is also for system protection.
Contact MSI directly spawned some very interesting conversations. MSI’s Andy Tung’s initial response to us spelled out that MSI was concerned with users that may not have a full understanding of the system and MSI was wanting to limit the voltage changes they could implement. This is course totally understandable, but still it does not answer why you would only take the Vcore option away from a Prescott board. Further questioning revealed that there is some genuine concern about the Prescott’s durability under enthusiast voltage and clock situations.
I discussed the Vcore change question with the board designer over last weekend. Base on my understanding, the reason we didn't offer that when Prescott is populated was because a new Intel VID design on Prescott: "Dynamic VID" (VID becomes variable on different stages). According to the board designer, if M/B (BIOS) overwrite the Vcore, Dynamic VID will become invalid which might damage the CPU (Prescott Core) when power stage changed.
Please do understand that the quotes above have been pulled from an email conversation that was taking place and were not really structured to be used publicly, but they do outline some things that we are not able to document. We are unsure about the exact specification surrounding Dynamic VID and it can be interpreted a couple of different ways. From the way it was used in conversation MSI seems to be saying that the voltage varies during operation.
We have been monitoring a Prescott 2.8E voltage under normal usage and have found the voltage to fluctuate greatly. To be quite honest, I assumed the software we were using for monitoring was simply off, but this statement from MSI seems to back what we are seeing. Certainly we will report more on this, as we know more.
The Bottom Line
Getting down to brass tacks we are certainly seeing one of the giants in world retail motherboard sales approaching the Prescott and its use on their motherboards with kid gloves. Certainly there are some at MSI that think Vcore changes to the Prescott core could leave a user with a “burned up” CPU and that is something that MSI does not want to be responsible for. As IDF comes to a close this week, and things return to normal, I am sure we will find out more. As it stands now, you might want to make sure your Prescott lives to clock another day and back down on the voltage just a bit. Ours were a bit warm at 1.7v anyway!
Many thanks to MSI for shooting straight with us and trying their best to answer our questions. Also, while pulling the Vcore option for Prescott usage with some of their boards may not be the most popular thing in the world with the enthusiast, we are glad to see they are rather being safe than sorry with our new CPUs at this point in time.
