I am on fire!

[LCGuy]

So now that I have a 1 Ghz P3 chip in my posession, I have been after a Slocket adaptor for the past few days.

Got out of my lecture yesterday afternoon, and when Mum picked me up from uni, she suggested we go to the tip shop (just up the road) and have a look. I'm looking in the electrical section, and come across of all things, a new-in-packet Slocket adaptor! At least I think its new, anyway - it doesn't look like its been in a machine before, and the retaining clips are in good condition. Its just a cheap generic one, but oh well.

I hold it up and ask the guy who's running it how much it is. His answer? Free!

Only problem is that I'm having some...er....."complications". I've tried it on my Slot 1 board with both a Coppermine Celeron 600, and a Coppermine-T P3/1 Ghz chip, but with both chips, the machine just hangs at the boot screen. Sadly, the BIOS won't let me disable the boot screen. Its an AwardBIOS v4.51, IIRC, dated 1998. I know the board is fine, as with the stocko Slot-1 P3/450, the machine boots and runs, and both chips perform fine when used in a real skt370 system (my Compaq), so I'm assuming...

a) My BIOS may need to be flashed with an updated version (oh crap)

B) The Slocket adaptor may be defective, hence why it ended up in the tip shop to begin with (although I doubt it, there's not much to it, other than a couple of caps, and a heap of SMT resistors)

c) My chipset (Intel 440BX) may not be compatible with either processor (doubtful)

d) I may have forgotten something (possible)

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[lastmile77]

I vote for a variation on B. I played with a few different slockets awhile ago and my experience fit with what I'd found others had posted (way back when people were buying them for their then-current P3s). A lot of them are junk or nearly so. Yours might not support chips over a certain speed. I was testing dual 1GHz chips in several boards and the only slockets that I found that worked in all boards and worked with dual processors were made by ASUS. S370-D I think. Sounds like you don't care about dual processor compatibility but the quality issue might be your problem.

With it being free you're out nothing as long as you don't fry your CPUs or motherboard - I lost one CPU on the second slocket I tried and had to replace it, would have been really pissed had I lost the motherboard. If you don't get this one to work don't buy some $3 one off ebay and think it will. If you get it from an owner who actually used it then you're in good shape. If you buy it new from some business that lists dirt cheap, crappy parts then don't count on it.

 

[LCGuy]

It says on the packet that it supports "all" Coppermine skt370 processors. The Celery 600 with 128k of cache would've been a pretty early chip, so if anything, it should support at least that one. Either way, its something to think about, anyway. I hope that the Slocket isn't defective, then I'll have to actually buy one.

 

[Quadraman]

I found a website someone made years ago that is no longer being maintained about how he upgraded his Dell GX1 to a 1.4ghz P3 and in it he says that he had to DOWNGRADE his BIOS to get it to work. I will be going through this soon with my GX1's, so don't assume that your BIOS needs upgrading to get it to work with the new CPU.

And if the instruction sheet for your slocket adapter doesn't specifically state that Tualatin is supported, don't try fitting a Tualatin CPU to it.

 

[LCGuy]

I think i found the problem - bus speeds. The Celeron 600 uses a 66 Mhz FSB. My board is set to use a 100 Mhz bus. The P3/1 Ghz, on the other hand, uses a 133 Mhz FSB, which means that its out unless I overclock the board to 133 Mhz (and replace two of my PC100 DIMMs with PC133 modules), if i really want to do that...

 

[Quadraman]

I think i found the problem - bus speeds. The Celeron 600 uses a 66 Mhz FSB. My board is set to use a 100 Mhz bus. The P3/1 Ghz, on the other hand, uses a 133 Mhz FSB, which means that its out unless I overclock the board to 133 Mhz (and replace two of my PC100 DIMMs with PC133 modules), if i really want to do that...

It's probably a Tualatin, then. You need a slocket adapter that works with Tualatin chips.

 

[LCGuy]

Its a Coppermine-T, according to CPU-Z.

For the record, I've given up on this project, after discovering just last night that according to the manual for my motherboard, my version of the MS-6119 motherboard is the version that doesn't support Coppermine chips! :-/

 

[TylerEss]

Sad!

My in-laws have a dual coppermine 840. Why 840? 'Cuz the 440BX dual-slot-1 board they have can only reliably overclock its bus to 112MHz.

1GHz slot-1 PIIIs with 133 bus are really really cheap, but the 100MHz bus ones are very expensive. So, I'm overclocking the bus and underclocking the CPUs. :-D

I hope you can find a good place to put your slocket to use.

 

[LCGuy]

Problem is, that board is the only Slot 1 board I've got, which will have to just "limp" along on the P3/450 for a bit longer.

Oh well, the Slocket was free anyway, so I shouldn't complain.

 

[Anonymous Freak]

heh. I just won a dual P3/600 on eBay. $21.39 shipped. Board, procs with heatsinks, 768 MB RAM, NIC, video card (nVidia Quadro2,) and sound card.

It will be a nice mid-range machine. I have one of those single-bay dual 3.5"/5.25" floppy drives that I've been itching to use, but my oldest "reasonably modern" machine only recognizes one floppy drive; and the next older machine is a 486 that I can't reasonably run Windows 2000 on.

I'm tempted to rustle up a dual Pentium Pro board to go with my Pentium II OverDrive processors, but those are spendy. (The procs are really a 333 MHz Pentium II, only with a full-speed L2 cache like the PPro instead of the half-speed cache the regular P2 had; on the PPro's Socket 8.)

This system will be good for playing old DOS games, since it has ISA slots, I can use my old SB 16 or GUS.

Sadly, the revision of board I bought doesn't support Coppermine, so 600 MHz is as fast as it will go. A same-model, newer-revision motherboard with a pair of 800 MHz procs and 1 GB of RAM (but no extra cards,) has a buy-it-now of $95. (And, oddly, an opening bid of $95. Why not make it JUST a buy-it-now?)