Hi, my name is R.J. Lorimer, and I own a 2.66GHz Northwood Pentium IV.

“Hi R.J.”.

Bad AA jokes aside, I want to review one of the most disappointing computers I have ever bought, my last desktop before my new 3GHZ Core 2 Duo. My Northwood almost pushed me away from Intel for good.

A few years back, I bought a bevy of top-of-the-line parts from my friendly neighborhood NewEgg. In that tape-riddled box full of Styrofoam peanuts and bubble-wrap I pulled out part after part of my soon-to-be awesome computer.

Memory? Check. Motherboard? 10-4. Video Card? Ooh Shiny. On and on I went.

Nestled in with all of these wonderful transistor-laden parts sat a little surprise straight from our friends in Santa Clara - a Northwood Pentium IV - the cornerstone of my then-brand-new computer. I handled this tiny little sprig of silicon with the care of a surgeon working on an infant. This was the mother-brain of my new beast; the MCP of my little TRON world. Little did I know what it actually was. Two words: Fire Hazard.

After spending so many years as sole care-taker for my geriatric Pentium IV, I’ve come up with a lot of reasons I could complain about this little chip. As an example: right after I bought it, they started re-selling the chip with an 800MHz FSB instead of the paltry 533MHz on mine. The newer 800MHz chips chips also shipped with Intel-multiple-personality-disorder, aka Hyper-Threading, which as you all know gives you the warm fuzzies every time you look at your System settings in Windows (I have two CPUs? Holy fucking moses!).

But I’m not going to complain about those things. No, my primary complaint instead is that Intel didn’t advertise that I was buying a furious inferno of heat.

To give you some indicator of how hot we are talking about, when my little baby chip is idling, I’m lucky if he runs at 55-60 degrees Celsius. Yes, Celsius. Now, I’m not very good at conversions, but reliable sources have told me that the Fahrenheit calculation of that is roughly equivalent to the surface of the sun.

When paired with a more exhausting task (like spreadsheets) the CPU will start to climb away from idle. As the little CPU% bar in Windows task manager rises, so does the ambient temperature in Kansas City. We’re talking H O T. Let’s just say the A-Bit motherboard has a factory-set 75 degree Celsius alarm, followed by an 80 degree Celsius emergency shut-off, and I have set those off more than once.

Now, this is about the time I would expect several people to say things like:

You need to clean your case!

and…

You need to put new arctic silver on the chip.

and…

You need to get a bigger heat-sink.

And in response to that I say “Bite my shiny metal ass”. I bought an OEM CPU, not some chore or errand. I don’t want to have to go buy a bunch of equipment to keep a stock, non-over-clocked CPU from setting my house on fire.

So I went out and bought some arctic silver, a bigger heat sink, and blew all the dust out of my case. Has it helped? Absolutely. It has helped like a respirator helps someone in a vegetative state. I certainly don’t get the temperatures I did with the OEM equipment; and I don’t go to bed every night afraid my office will ignite. Every day it survives, however, I face the internal struggle of deciding whether or not to euthanize this poor burden of a computer.

Ironically, the Northwood series, which were already spiraling into startling frequencies (peaking with a 3.4GHz variant), were some of the first chips to really face the onslaught of mainstream over-clocking. For whatever reason, the over-clocking market really started to take off around the time that Intel was shipping these miniature super-novas.

In any case, I have since relegated this computer to backup duty - and simply don’t turn it on regularly any more. I always have the plan to turn it in to a Linux-based file-server, but the thought of giving it any more of my time or money is like in-home-dentistry.

In short - if you have one - I feel your pain. If you don’t - don’t bother!