Pentium 3 in old Pentium 2 motherboard?

[Kinghunter]

I have a Pentium 3 processor that is 600mhz and a pentium 2 that is either 400 or 450 not sure. How would I be able to tell if I can put the Pentium 3 processor into the pentium 2 motherboard? and is PC133 ram backwards compatible with PC100 ram?

 

[DieHardware]

Which board?

 

[Kinghunter]

Im not sure of the motherboard model # but it is from a IBM PC300PL.

 

[keeleysam]

I tried that before and my board (from an HP Vectra no less) said it was "Unrecognized i386". I could get into BIOS and mess around, but as soon as anythign was executed on the CPU, it froze.

 

[imported_whatever]

It will likely work, but the only way to be really sure is to try it. The mobo does obviously support 100MHz FSB, which means it likely supports P3. For the RAM, PC133 does work in PC100 mobos but it is likely that your mobo doesn't support high density RAM. Therefore you would need to have 16 chips for a 256MB DIMM, and you can extrapolate from there.

 

[Painman]

I had a slot 1 PIII 450 working just fine in an ASUS P2B-F, an early PII board, so it could potentially work. Flash the board to the most recent BIOS you can find for it... check the IBM site or use a diagnostic program to try an figure out what board it is.

 

[ND40oz]

I upgraded my p2 350 to a dual p3 600 on a Tyan motherboard. You'll need to go to your motherboards vendors website, check for the latest bios updates. The should have release notes for the bios, which will tell you what support was added with each version of the bios. It should tell you what speeds the motherboard should support.

 

[dannybin1742]

as long as the fsb is 100mhz you should be fine, i've been upgrading gateway E4200s with p2 350s to p3 celeron 1.4ghz with a slot adapter, and the cpu is not recognizzed in the bios but windows recognizes it, and everything works great, the speed increase is incredible

if you want to check the upgradbility, go to powerleap.com, and use their manual product upgrade check thing, you simply chose your brand, and computer model, and it will tell you if you can upgrade it to anything