I would like to upgrade the Processor to a Pentium 4 running at 2.8 GHz (prescott). I contacted the HP tech support by email to see what processsors the motherboard supports. They replied by telling me that the motherboard supports the P4 with a Northwood core. If I'm not mistaken, isn't the Celeron D a Prescott based processor? Then shouldn't I be able to install a Prescott based P4 since the Celeron is based on the P4? Thanks for any replies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celeron http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o... A Northwood Core is a Northwood core, therefore if HP/Compaq state only Northwoood then you can not use a Prescott etctetc...

Below are your motherboard specs. Notice the CPU support. It accepts the P4 Williamette & Northwood up to 2.8GHz & Prescott based Celerons up to 3.06 GHz. Only 400MHz & 533MHz FSB is supported. http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/... What is it that you hope to gain with a CPU upgrade? http://www.starmicro.net/detail.asp...

Thanks for the response; I hadn't looked at the motherboard specs in detail. I just assumed that if it accepted a Prescott based Celeron, it would also accept a Prescott based P4. I just want to increase the performance of the system. I just pulled a 2.8 GHz P4 from another computer so i thought I'd install it in the Presario. And it turns it out the processor is a Northwood anyway.

Nope. It all has to do with the FSB on the motherboard. If the FSB on the motherboard only supports 533mhz max then regardless if your motherboard can support prescott cores it's not going to be able to support all the versions, because some versions of the socket 478 prescotts use 800mhz FSB. So what will end up happening is if you do throw one of those versions into your motherboard it may not work at all or at best will work but your clock speed will be really low. Iron Sharpens Iron.