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Good news: won a computer that could be put to use, need advice on upgrades

P

Poritz

Member
On monday my father won a raffle at work. In an attempt to keep employees happy they set a raffle and my father won a pentium II machine. I want to put it to use on the distributed folding project, but it will need upgrades to become effective. Here is what I know about it.

-Built by Compusa
-pentium II at 266 i believe
-32MB of SDRAM
-10/100 nic
-3GB HDD
-onboard A/V
-1.44 floppy

It will of course need a CD drive, but what can I do about the CPU? The motherboard is generic, so I don't what the limits are. I also thought about trying linux on it. Would appreciate any suggestions.

-Poritz
 
Poritz,
If you could get in and find out what MB it's using, that would be a start. As is, it would take 18 hours or more crunching SETI. (I have a PII266 that avgs 17.5hrs per WU 😉)

I don't know what it would do for the other DC projects.

The MB info should be on the edge, or over by the PCI slots. Grab the #s, and do a Google search.

How to ID a motherboard

Once you know the MB, we will know if it is upgradable or not. 🙂
 
Put in some more RAM, if you can. Hopefully it takes PC/100 or PC/133 SDR SDRAM DIMMs, because older SIMMs are getting harder to find and are very expensive per MB. If you have at least 96MB of RAM, you can run Windows 2000 or Linux plus the project of your choice, but the system won't be comfortable for everyday use. Try to get at least 128MB of RAM if you can.
 
Well I found out that it can take up to a 333Mhz PII, and that it takes standard 168 pin DIMMS. I don't know what speed DIMMS it will take so that is what I am trying to find out now. It will be either 66 or 100 but I doubt it would be 133. So I am off to buy a CD-ROM for it. If anyone knows how to identify memory speed let me know.

Thanks again,
-Poritz
 
If it only takes upto a PII 333 then its an LX chipset ,which only supports PC66 SDRAM ,however you can plug in PC 100 or PC 133(not CL2 though) & it should work fine🙂(it'll just be underclocked 😉).
Make sure you find out the max size RAM module the mbrd can support though (check chip quantities per module too)

Btw there's a good chance the mbrd will support Celerons too (upto 533 not 533A),check out the latest bios & info for it at the website.
What mbrd is it anyway?
 
There is a lot of high-density PC133 out now, and it won't jive with the chipset... you may get half or one-quarter of it recognized, or none, or no POST at all. So I would say PC100 or PC66 unbuffered non-parity for that. And yeah, another 64Mb of RAM would do it good. There are some projects with such a small RAM footprint that even 32Mb would get the job done, and in fact I have even run a dual-Celeron system with WinNT 4.0 Workstation and 32Mb of RAM, crunching RC5-64. ECC2-109 comes to mind and you can look through the AnandTech FAQ's I made for some other projects, to see what the RAM demands are.
 
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