Thanks Chopa!

Yep, I always love the ASUS site. You are certainly correct that many options come up when you put in the Socket 478 today, including yours, but last night only two came up and a search for your exact motherboard returned "0 items returned in your search" !

This is going to be a long and slightly technical post, full of not so nice things to say about the Asus site and their 'support', so if you just want to know what I think you should do, go to the summary at the end.

After mucking about on the ASUS site for way too long, I did come across a smattering of reference in the forums related to your Mobo about the Prescotts being defined by Intel techs as possibly not working on the mobo because of the L2 cache size (entirely possible because these are 1m). On the other hand, at least one of the Asus people on the boards seemed to think it might be possible a P4 Prescott with a 512 L2 cache WOULD work...since there aren't any P4 Prescotts with less than a 1m L2 (and I think the Celerons are 256), I decided not to pay much more attention to the Asus responders.

Despite this, I also found this less-than-obvious location for CPUs supported by the p4pe:

http://support.asus.com/cpusupport/c...s&model=P4PE-X

Here you will see the list of what the board supports as of the last time ASUs updated their list... Trust me, its been a while. Since their last Bios update was in 2003, its a cinch they haven't gone on to look at what more modern CPUs can be used on the board, or made even the most insignificant effort to make these compatible with your board either... Like many board makers, no money in it for them. Now if you troll through the list you will see many low-powered, outmode-type cpus, and toward the bottom, a few that might make you satisfied for the time being.

Nota Bene:
The p4pe-x board means 800 fsb cpus all will require you upgrade to the newest Bios, buy PC 3200 (ddr 400) and there you are also limited to only one stick in the first slot, and further there is a typically cryptic and non-english type of vague reference that appears to purport only northwoods are supported. This appears to conflict with info provided on the cpu page, but that's typical. This 800 fsb information can be found if you look at the "limitations" link listed next to any of the fsb 800 cpus in the cpu list... Except, that unless you are lucky, you will often see NOTHING in the "limitations" link because their site is not optimized for Explorer or some other reason as they have done to many of the links on their site (if they work at all - another case in point is the reference link for the updated Bios for the p4pe-x which will tell you sorrowfully that it is 'still under construction, come back soon' ... Since they made the Bios update in 2003, it seems they should have been done by now, but most likely, like most of the other things on their site, it will never be done). If you run into the "limitations" link problem, I was able to come up with a work around : move the cursor all the way to the top of the page of the limitations, and then from the limitation link, choose the "technical papers" link and once you go there, click on the "back" button on your browser and you should be able to see the limitations if you want to see what I was talking about above.

Summary
Bad news is, if you want the faster FSB, the dopes make it so you have to buy the faster ram, which is ok, but paradoxically, they limit you to only one stick of it...

Also, we want to buy more bigger sticks of ram in addition to what we have, not eliminate what we have, so there looked to be a 3.06 ghz P 4 on the list, that has a 533 fsb. This does not require you change your ram, but you may have to update your bios if you do not have bios 1004 or higher (there is actually a 1007 out, but you may not need it). Also, probably any of the 533 or 400 CPUs in the 2.4 plus range should be ok too, just stay away from 800 fsb's and make sure the L2 Cache is 512, no larger. And sorry, this means NO Prescotts unless you want a Celeron, since the L2 Cache is too large.

Next, it also appears that the p4pe-x can only take a double sided ram stick in the fist slot, so that will have to be your only mongo stick, and the others can keep the soon to be museum bound 256's. (the 2 and 3 slots are set up in such a way that if you put a double sided stick in one of them, it makes the other unusable... another handy feature from those geniuses at Asus limiting the upside of your memory muscle). I have not seen anything to indicate you cannot take a 1 meg stick in slot number one and this would seem to be neccessarily possible if the sys is to reach its purported max of 2 gigs with only 3 slots (two of which can only take single sided ram).

Use the link above. You can look at the lists by mobo or by the processor you find... For other Asus users, this is a handy list, so book mark it.

Chopa, hope this helps. Look at the list, look up what you want to get and let me know?

Al Jabberwock