How much can I upgrade my PII 266?

[jm0ut]

I have a gateway with an anigma PII motherboard and a PII 266 processor. I want to upgrade the processor as much as I can without changing the motherboard. The manual says that the motherboard will only support up to 333mhz, but I was told I can buy a converter to use a celeron. Can I put a 700mhz celeron in my motherboard??
Email me

 

[AndyHui]

Very doubtful that you can put in a Celeron 700. Two things are needed to support Coppermine Celerons: BIOS Support and voltage support. Even if you had a very recent BIOS update (within the last 6 months), LX boards very rarely have the physical capability of supplying the voltages that new processors request.

If you have a BIOS update from some time in 1999, then the fastest you should be able to do is a PPGA Celeron 533.

 

[RickH]

Probably a Celeron 533, not the Celeron II 533A as it takes a lower voltage. You would also need a BIOS update for you board to recognize the 300A to 533 core. Try to find the BIOS and see if it says anything about Mendocino chips, they require 2.0 volts, not the 2.8 volts like your PII 266. R

 

[jm0ut]

okay...well what do think would work better a PII 333, or the celeron 533 you speak of.

jmo

 

[RickH]

I don't have any benchmarks for that old a PII, both chips are 66 MHz bus. The PII has more memory, but the C533 must be faster.

 

[JiffyLube]

The Celeron 533 would be much faster; about 2X faster (and I dont just mean clock speed.)

The Pentium II's and original Pentium 3's used 512K of Level-2 cache memory running at half the processor speed; all new Celerons, Durons, Pentium 3's and Athlons use full-speed cache memory.

So your Pentium II 333 has 512K of L2 cache that runs at 166MHz, the Celeron 533 has 128K of Level2 cache which runs at the full 533 MHz (which is faster than 512k of 166mhz memory).

It's definately worth the price to upgrade to a Celeron 533/566/600 for you.

All you need is a Slotket adapter with voltage adjustments on it and the Celeron CPU.

You need the slotket because your Motherboard (all the motherboards for Pentium II's) use the Slot-1 interface to connect the cpu (it's like a long PCI slot really, but on the other side of the motherboard; with the CPU and big fan on it). All new Celerons and Pentium III's are Socket370, a smaller square socket that is present on the motherboard. The slotket adapter is an adapter for Slot-1 motherboards to accept Socket 370 CPUs and it's quite cheap: around $10-15.

I hope this helps!