Pentium 4 Motherboards
Socket 423
Socket 423 was the first Pentium 4 socket. It was rather short-lived, but still went through a few changes in its life. It only supported early Willamette core CPUs, which were mostly deemed as below expectations product.
Most Socket 423 motherboards used RDRAM with Intel 850 chipset instead of the more common DDR or SDRAM, making it too expesive, and, as an unforseen result, it can be considered a fabled rarity in some areas of the world.
The first Pentium 4 chipset to support DDR was VIA P4X266 (mid-2001), and its price/performance balance was promising indeed. Meanwhile Intel pushed out the i845, which only supported PC133 SDRAM in its early steppings. It was too slow for obvious reasons, and by the time Intel 845 B0-Step (aka 845D, aka 845DDR) was ready, Socket 478 almost completely took over the market.
Today: Unless you're into historically accurate systems or, for some reason you need to work with P4 1.3GHz, there's very little sense in building such a rig these days. The 2.0GHz Pentium 4 is about as fast as a Tualatin 1.4GHz while consuming a lot more power.
Socket 478
Today: There are four major cores available for this socket: Willamette, Northwood, Prescott and Gallatin. The most interesting are perhaps Northwood and Gallatin. Gallatin is the Extreme Edition chip, a rebranded Xeon core with L3 cache.
Socket 775
Otherwise known as LGA 775. Prescott and Cedar Mill Pentium 4 CPUs, and of course Core 2, used this socket. Early LGA 775 boards do not support Core 2 although later boards often support all LGA 775 CPUs.
Today: Not very interesting for old games because these boards typically do not have AGP and may not support Windows 9x.
