Pentium II CPU upgrading to Pentium III ???

  • Thread starter Thread starter Hans Huber
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Hans Huber

A friend of mine has this old computer with a Jetway 720BF motherboard, 64MB
of 168pin 100MHz SDRAM and a Pentium II (Slot 1) CPU (100MHz FSB) with
450MHz installed. The computer still does the job but I was wondering if it
would be possible to tweak the thing a little bit. According to the manual
the motherboard supports Pentium II and III CPU's up to 500MHz. Now I know
it would not make much sense to upgrade to a 500MHz from a 450 so I was
wondering if it would be possible to chuck a Pentium III CPU in with say
1000MHz? The manual does not say you can but by the time of writing how
could it? So my question is, is there any difference between a Pentium III
500 and a Pentium III 1000???? Will that motherboard support the 1000 MHz
CPU? Or is there some significant differences in the later Pentium III
CPU's? Unfortunately the webpage from Jetway is not too helpful either. For
those who care to check:
http://www.jetway.com.tw/evisn/product/slot1/720bf/720bf.htm

Memory4less as an example sells Pentium III CPU's
http://www.memory4less.com/cpus/m4l_pentium3.asp

The motherboard also supports up to 1.5 GB of RAM (which seems really
excessive!) and I was thinking of chucking an additional 128 or maybe 256 MB
of RAM in there to speed things up a little.

What are your opinions???

Thanks heaps in advance

Hans
 
Hans Huber said:
A friend of mine has this old computer with a Jetway 720BF motherboard, 64MB
of 168pin 100MHz SDRAM and a Pentium II (Slot 1) CPU (100MHz FSB) with
450MHz installed. The computer still does the job but I was wondering if it
would be possible to tweak the thing a little bit. According to the manual
the motherboard supports Pentium II and III CPU's up to 500MHz. Now I know
it would not make much sense to upgrade to a 500MHz from a 450 so I was
wondering if it would be possible to chuck a Pentium III CPU in with say
1000MHz? The manual does not say you can but by the time of writing how
could it? So my question is, is there any difference between a Pentium III
500 and a Pentium III 1000???? Will that motherboard support the 1000 MHz
CPU? Or is there some significant differences in the later Pentium III
CPU's? Unfortunately the webpage from Jetway is not too helpful either. For
those who care to check:
http://www.jetway.com.tw/evisn/product/slot1/720bf/720bf.htm

Memory4less as an example sells Pentium III CPU's
http://www.memory4less.com/cpus/m4l_pentium3.asp

The motherboard also supports up to 1.5 GB of RAM (which seems really
excessive!) and I was thinking of chucking an additional 128 or maybe 256 MB
of RAM in there to speed things up a little.

What are your opinions???
Click to expand...


the machine will not take any more than the documentation states

but adding more ram should make an improvement
 
Hans Huber said:
A friend of mine has this old computer with a Jetway 720BF motherboard, 64MB
of 168pin 100MHz SDRAM and a Pentium II (Slot 1) CPU (100MHz FSB) with
450MHz installed. The computer still does the job but I was wondering if it
would be possible to tweak the thing a little bit. According to the manual
the motherboard supports Pentium II and III CPU's up to 500MHz. Now I know
it would not make much sense to upgrade to a 500MHz from a 450 so I was
wondering if it would be possible to chuck a Pentium III CPU in with say
1000MHz? The manual does not say you can but by the time of writing how
could it? So my question is, is there any difference between a Pentium III
500 and a Pentium III 1000???? Will that motherboard support the 1000 MHz
CPU? Or is there some significant differences in the later Pentium III
CPU's? Unfortunately the webpage from Jetway is not too helpful either. For
those who care to check:
http://www.jetway.com.tw/evisn/product/slot1/720bf/720bf.htm

Memory4less as an example sells Pentium III CPU's
http://www.memory4less.com/cpus/m4l_pentium3.asp

The motherboard also supports up to 1.5 GB of RAM (which seems really
excessive!) and I was thinking of chucking an additional 128 or maybe 256 MB
of RAM in there to speed things up a little.

What are your opinions???

Thanks heaps in advance

Hans
Click to expand...

Adding some more RAM will definitely help you out. I recommend 256MB minimum
these days.

As far as upgrading the processor goes ... I really don't know. It's
possible you might be able to use a slotket adapter to socket 370 and stick
a faster PIII on there. I say this because the reason the board won't go
over 500MHz is because of it's multiplier. The slotket adapters have their
own multiplier jumper on them.

But there is one catch to this ... your FSB speed. If the board can't do
133MHz on the FSB then you're pretty much out of luck. The fastest 100FSB
(Katmai core) PIII made was 600Mhz.

Oh, and voltage plays a role as well. The Coppermine core requires 1.65V ...

The more I think about this the more I'm pretty sure you're hosed for a new
processor, unless you just want to replace the board as well ... in which
case you can run a PIII as fast as you want for not too much dough. (though
more than upgrading the processor alone)

If I'm completely wrong on this somebody please speak up. I've been an AMD
man for 7 or 8 years and despite owning one PIII 800 system (I bought from
Office Depot) I know very little about them.


Drumguy

P.S. - The slotket became very popular with overclockers who would use them
to put Celerons on PII and PIII boards and run them at either 100MHz (for a
66 bus celly) or 133 (for a 100 bus celly) ... doing this instead of just
cranking up the multiplier resulted in huge overclocking numbers without
adding any instability (so long as it was running at a *normal* speed ...
i.e. 100,133, as opposed to 105,118,145. I'm not sure if these were really
possible FSB speeds, but just as an example of *non-standard* bus speeds)
 
Hans Huber said:
That's true I think. So I was hoping to use a Coppermine core (which as you
already know needs lower voltage). See below for my further thoughts!

(for speeds)


Well that's probably where my problem lies. I need 100MHz FSB and I believe
the mobo puts out 2V core voltage and the multiplier is 5 for the Pentium
III 500MHz. If I try to install a Coppermine Pentium III with 950MHz (which
is still 100MHz FSB) it needs only 1.7V I believe (and the mobo manual says
nothing about changing voltage!), the L2 cache dropped to 256 from 512 from
the Katmai to the Coppermine (I don't know what the implication of that is)
and the multiplier goes to 9.5 on the Coppermine (no idea what that means
for me exactly). So I still havethe same FSB but all the other values
changed.

I just guess that the voltage will be my main problem, L2 probably too,
multiplier not sure.

But thanks for your help so far! Very much appreciated indeed!

Hans
Click to expand...
Definetely more memory to improve performance. Wouldn't recommend 500 over
450 because too little a gain.

I thought the PII-450 was the overclocker's dream cpu at the time. Try
www.overclockers.com and http://www.ocinside.de/index_e.html for help and
results from overclocking with the multipliers. I saw one result with
900mhz with a different board http://www.cpudatabase.com/CPUdb/.

Otherwise I'd look for a Cel/P3/AMD - mb combo upgrade that fits your case
and psu to take your friend to the next upgrade. About power requirements
PII/PIII use about 1.75v from the +12v which can run with a 230w AT psu but
I'm not sure about the AMDs.
 
It always seems that secondhand P3s sell for far too much. You could
probably pick up a cheap mobo (get one that takes both SDRAM and DDR)
and a low end Athlon XP chip for under $100 new - and it will be over
three times the speed of a P3-500Mhz.

Eg: ECS K7S5A Pro + Athlon XP 1800+ can be had here for under €100, and
all you other bits should work with this board.
Click to expand...


Looks like this is the way to go. Too much trouble to upgrade this shitty
mobo and CPU.
At least I learned a bit about Slot 1 Pentiums II and III !

Thanks for all your help!

Much appreciated!

Hans
 
Could I suggest taking a look on the Jetway website. Look for BIOS updates
for your board, and read the revision history about what they fix.

Just sometimes, they enable faster processors than the written documentation
states - but only with the BIOS update.

Regards,
Mark.
 
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