What is the advantage of the Intel socket 775 over the socket 478?

Question

Sometimes two motherboards have the same chipsets but one has a 478-pin socket and one has a 775-pin socket. Is the 775 board better for some reason? What are the extra pins doing?

Answer 1

Quite simply it is better because it is the current socket, and hence all the new processors from Intel use it. It is important however to also make sure you get a good chipset, because even if a processor is socket 775 and the motherboard is socket 775, if it does not have the right chipset the processor will not work.

Answer 2

The 775 pin is the current standard for Intel. The 478 pin set though still available, is out dated. The number of pins is the number of pipelines in and out of the processor, the more the better in most regards. If you buy a motherboard with a 478 pin socket you will be extremely limited as to which processor it will handle, since the current intel standard is the 775 pin socket. If you are considering buying a new motherboard, I recommend you try to get the current standard whether its the 775 for Intel, or the AM2 socket for AMD. These boards will offer you the best available options for processors currently on the market, and potentially offer you the best chance to upgrade your processor later as new technologies come out unless they change their standards again by then.

Answer 3

You are not looking at it correctly. The 2.4 GHZ quad processor is almost equivalent to a 10 GHZ processor, and in the case of AMD at 64 bits. If this confuses you I will try to explain. A processor is rated by how many times it cycles a second. We call this GHZ or gigahertz. a 1 GHZ processor will make a pass all the data on the buss 1 million times a second. Now with Intel, the buss is 32 bits wide, which means it can hold 32 1s or 0s, and these will be passed thru the processor at the rate of 1 million times a second, so each second will process 32 million bits. A single core 3 GHz processor will pass 96 million bits a second (32 times 3 million). In an AMD 64 chip, the buss is 64 bits wide, so a 1 GHZ chip in a AMD 64 machine will pass 64 million bits a second. Now you add in the multipliers. First a dual core processor will pass twice the number of bits a second as a single core, and a quad will pass 4 times as much. So a dual core Intel 3.0 chip will be equal to a 6GHZ machine, 3 GHz times 2 cores= 6ghz. a 2.4 quad effectively runs at 9.6 Ghz, 2.4 times 4. Now your concern about not using more than one processor: First, the computers have only one processor, but more than one core. It used to be that a dual processor machine would use one processor till it maxed out, then kick off the second one, but now the chips are "load balanced", so that the load is spread across the available cores. In this way, you have an incredible reserve of processing power if you ever need to load up on applications, but all the chips run cooler and last longer. These totals are theoretical, and much depends on the architecture of the motherboard. Hope this helps

Answer 4

478 is nearly out in the market, 775 is the latest and it certainly is better. but at the rate its going it will also soon be upgraded to another pin configuration for far better performance

Answer 5

More pipelines larger data throughput makes for a faster frontside bus and faster machine.