Beating The Wicked By Upgrading

[DeRailur]

Heres what I have: An HP pc that is about 4 years old, came with a 500 celly on a 66 fsb. Officially HP states that this mobo (asus hawk) can only be upgraded to a 550 cpu
Well I found a jumper on the mobo that can bump the fsb up to 100 and in BIOS I see that the multiplier goes up to 20. I was thinking of getting a p3 700/100 or so to throw in there and get a little more out of this puppy. Heres the question:

Can this mobo be limited to only accept a 550 cpu even though the fsb and multiplier values in BIOS say otherwise? Also, whats the fastest socket 370 chip that runs on 100 fsb (the fastest i could find was a p3 800). Thanks in advance.

 

[myocardia]

Are your text documents opening too slowly? Hey, I say you try it, but I would have sworn that the Intels, starting with the P3's, were multiplier locked. Don't quote me on that, because I've been using AMD since, well, forever. Anyone else know (or remember that far back!) for sure?

 

[DeRailur]

Im not talking about unlocking any cpu multipliers here. Ill restate, THE BIOS MULTIPLIER GOES UP TO 20. Therefore it could/should support a processor with up to a 20 multiplier in it. But HP has stated that the mobo will not support anything above 550 mhz, is this crap or is it possible that theboard is limited to that speed?

 

[high]

Try it and see how much faster your word doc's load/save

 

[Overkast]

Spoken like a true stoner.

P3's were fast Processors... you can play quite a few games on them without any problems. They're good for more than just word processing d00d.

 

[DeRailur]

No doubt, quit dogging the p3 about word docs. It could play some games in its time and still can regardless of what out there is faster. I would like to try it but dont want to drop $50+ on a proc to find out, I'd rather that someone with soemthing useful to say posted here to give a brother some help.

By the way, don't come a cryin to me when you get dogged in two years about your 2.4c @ 8.9 ghz not encoding mpegs fast enough.

 

[DeRailur]

No doubt, quit dogging the p3 about word docs. It could play some games in its time and still can regardless of what out there is faster. I would like to try it but dont want to drop $50+ on a proc to find out, I'd rather that someone with soemthing useful to say posted here to give a brother some help.

By the way, don't come a cryin to me when you get dogged in two years about your 2.4c @ 8.9 ghz not encoding mpegs fast enough.

 

[DeRailur]

Whoaaa, now wait just a sec here you flamers. I took a sec to check out your rigs and I dont think either of you have any business dogging my p3 idea. How long did it take the two of you combined to view and reply to my post with your smokin fast 56k ("when I'm lucky") connections? And myocardia, what kinda framerates you getting with that gf3 ti 500 (released about the same time as p3s btw)??? The pot calling the kettle black. Pfffft

 

[high]

Hehe chillax I think it would work fine with that jumper and the multi's going up to 20. Try er out...Duke Nukem 3D should run nicely

 

[DeRailur]

Ahh the relentless flame of my idea. What am I to do. Thanks for your infinitely wise advice tho, really. Oh omnipotent one.
Does anyone know if this thing can possibly be limited tho, even tho the fsb and multipliers say otherwise?
BTW Pretty quick response there high. You must have your internet speed accelerator tweaked to the max!!

 

[DeRailur]

biggity bump

 

[Tambora]

You can try jumpering the front side bus (fsb) to 100 and see if your current celeron will overclock. I have an old BX chipset board running a celeron 600 @ 900 for about three years now just by changing the jumper setting to 100. Give that a shot as it won't cost anything and if it doesn't boot, set it back to where it was. Back up your data if any of it is critical and can't be lost! The original cpu on this board was a PII 350 - it did not like the 100mhz bus at all.

If this works you probably would not not to spend any money on a PIII 550. I believe the fastest 100mhz fsb PIII was 1ghz and they are hard to find. Have fun! :beer:

 

[User1001]

That works for slot one but for 370 socket not sure but I found an 850 http://www.starmicro.net/detail.aspx?ID=90
They also have a slot one 1.0 ghz/100 fsb but it 275 and I think you have a socket 370

 

[myocardia]

Originally posted by: DeRailur
Whoaaa, now wait just a sec here you flamers. I took a sec to check out your rigs and I dont think either of you have any business dogging my p3 idea. How long did it take the two of you combined to view and reply to my post with your smokin fast 56k ("when I'm lucky") connections? And myocardia, what kinda framerates you getting with that gf3 ti 500 (released about the same time as p3s btw)??? The pot calling the kettle black. Pfffft

Let's see, DeRailur, I have an Athlon XP running at 2.4ghz anytime that I feel the need for it, and that GF3 gets over 10k in 3dMark2k1, anytime I feel like overclocking it, so what exactly was your point?

BTW, building or tweaking computers yourself is always a bit hit-or-miss, so if you aren't willing to blow a whole $50, what's the point of this thread anyway?

 

[DeRailur]

The point was to see if anyone knew if it was conceivable that a motherboard with a 100mhz fsb and bios support for a multiplier of up to 20 could be limited to run only a 550 mhz chip. Frankly, I am not made of money and the extra $50 could be used to buy a more expensive 1g of ram that runs at tighter settings than 1g of ram that runs at lesser settings for the next box I'm building.

Next shot from you myo, or does anyone have anything meaningful to add.....

 

[Jeff7181]

If nothing else, that HP would make a perfect HTPC (if you put a P3 in it)... I'm assuming it's extremely quiet, right? Stick a TV Tuner in there and hook it up to your TV.

BTW... now days, 10k in 3DMark sucks =)

 

[DeRailur]

That would be an idea but this board doesnt have an agp slot, so I'd be forced to find a PCI solution. I'm thinking of using it as a server on my home network, possibly for lan games.

 

[Jeff7181]

Most TV Tuners are PCI... in fact, all of them are, unless of course you get an ATI All-in-Wonder card.

The Game server is another idea... but hey, why limit it to either? Why not use it for both? All it needs is a bit of CAT-5 coming out of it

 

[WHipLAsh13]

DeRailur it is conceivable that it could be limited to only being able to support Katmai core P3 and will not support any Coppermine core P3 processors. This was the case with my P2b board. I could only run Katmai processors on it.

 

[KF]

>The point was to see if anyone knew if it was conceivable that a motherboard with
>a 100mhz fsb and bios support for a multiplier of up to 20 could be limited to run
>only a 550 mhz chip. Frankly, I am not made of money...

PIIs and IIIs set the voltage and FSB on the mobo by output pins on the chip. unless you over-rule it with an OCing BIOS or a mobo jumper. Since the CPU (except for engineering samples) sets itself internally to a locked multiplier, it automatically runs at that multiplier regardless of the BIOS. The typical BIOS problem is cosmetic: it won't identify correctly on the boot screen. But otherwise the CPU runs normally. The only real BIOS problem is something called the "microcode." Depending on the stepping, the BIOS may not have the latest microcode for it. The microcode is a minor chip update that is written to the CPU when it starts up (by the BIOS normally) and corrects minor chip problems. In some few cases, the chip may have a stabilty problem without a microcode update. Some BIOSes will refuse to go on if they do not have the microcode for the stepping. They just halt the CPU. There is no way to know that for all mobos and BIOSes. It doesn't happen a lot, but it does happen. A mobo that will take a 500MHz or over Celeron probably has a later BIOS that is OK. If this is an ASUS mobo, you may be able to reflash the BIOS to a straight ASUS instead of an HP-custom. The HP site (or some HP dedicated site) has a forum where people discuss this sort of thing, if I recall correctly. HP may have a BIOS update itself on their site. There is an amazing amount of info there, as I found out when attempting to upgrade an Emachines that used the same Trigems Cognac mobo as HP (supposedly identical). If you want to find some one who has tried what you are doing (and somebody probably has), your best bet is on the HP specific site. Unfortunately most of the activity like this was taking place ages ago, so archives is where the big info source will be.

The big problem is there are 3 PII/III/Celeron socketed chips, with intentional slightly incompatible pin-outs: PPGA, FCPGA (Coppermine), and FCPGA2 (Tualatin). Mobos of earlier dates may only be designed to take the earlier types. Getting earlier type CPUs improves chances of compatibility, but limits the speed.

PPGA Celerons when up to about 533. FCPGA Celerons went up to about 1000 (1100?). FCPGA2 Celerons went up to 1400GHz. At about 1000, Celerons went to 100MHz FSB, and PIII to 133.

>fastest socket 370 chip that runs on 100 fsb

FCPGA2 Celerons go to 1400MHz. Under $50. People say they are actually identical to the slower PIIIs that ran at 133FSB.
Pricewatch
ZipZoom Fly 1300 $41 shipped

 

[Overkast]

Great input KF! Very thorough.

 

[lobbyone]

Originally posted by: DeRailur
Im not talking about unlocking any cpu multipliers here. Ill restate, THE BIOS MULTIPLIER GOES UP TO 20. Therefore it could/should support a processor with up to a 20 multiplier in it. But HP has stated that the mobo will not support anything above 550 mhz, is this crap or is it possible that theboard is limited to that speed?

thats a bunch of BS, IMO...i have an HP myself, a 8650c, the highest upgrade it could get according to its spec is only 600MHz celeron, thats nothing but bunch of nonsense. i ran a 1GHz Celeron "coppermine" juz fine on that HP mobo.

 

[DeRailur]

thanks for the wealth of good input, especially from KF and lobbyone. I appreciate it and am going to go ahead and order a p3 to put in there.