Need upgrade advice after 300A Celeron

[Tom94530]

I have a Celeron 300A with 128 MB of PC100 ram, an Abit Bh-6 Motherboard - based system and I would like to upgrade.

1) How high can I upgrade by keeping the Abit motherboard - in other words, what are the fastest chips or overclockable chips that will fit into my machine to yield more than the current 450mhz that I am gettiing?

2) What is the best overclocking value chip/motherboad combination if I wanted to upgrade completely to something higher than what my present MB allows?

Thank you!!
-Tom

 

[bigfootmd]

The Key issue is which BH6 do you have? This can be determined in two ways. If you have never, ever flashed the bios then you can read the last two characters of the BIOS string when your PC boots up.
There is a label on the outside edge of the first ISA slot that tells you which revision you have. Use a table knife or dental mirror to read this. Once you know which BH6 you have you can then download the latest BIOS from www.abit-usa.com.

Many users (inlcuding myself) have had great success in using a Celermine 566. There are several vendors here on this board that sell pretested 566 chips. I use the ABIT SLOCKET III. There is a wealth of information available in this forum. I run my Celeron 566 at 876 MHZ. Some have been successful in pushing this chip up to 900 MHZ. However, going from 450 MHZ to 850 MHZ is a very nice jump.
Good luck.

 

[Verschuur]

I have the same problem as you, have to upgrade from my trusty 300A@450 and BH6 rev 1.01. Thought about a celeron 566@850, but the performance gap of the celeron vs. PIII is just a bit to big if you ask me.
So I'm probably going for a PIII 700E FCPGA and try to get 933 MHz.

The latest BIOS (SS) for the BH6 rev 1.01 apparently supports the 1/4 PCI bus divider, although it doesn't show in the BIOS. So your PCI cards are all in spec.

PC100 memory depends if it runs at 133 MHz, there are various websites which tested it.
Check: http://sysopt.earthweb.com/reviews/sdram/, http://www.bxboards.com/sdram.shtml

About the AGP bus running at 89 MHz, depends on your graphics card if it goes OK. There are articles on Anandtech and Tom's Hardware which check various card. My V770 Ultra doesn't do any 3D at 103 MHz AGP bus, but if I disable AGP Sideband Adressing using the powerstrip program at (automatically at windows startup) it works OK even at 103 MHz AGP bus!

Menno (about to order a PIII 700E, good brandname FCPGA-slot1 converter and a GlobalWin FKP32 cooler and hoping for 933 Mhz....!)

 

[Nick Stone]

I'm going to repeat this because I still think this thread is the most infromative on this subject. This thread discusses all the options and pitfalls. Give it a try.
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.cfm?catid=27&threadid=209857