The only other ones I'm familiar w/ are the rather expensive
PowerLeaps.
It depends on what your board needs, whether it'd run a cheaper
adapter. Some only swap pin-locations and/or isolate pins, which
will work on some motherboards but not others. IIRC, that should
be all your board needs if it supports CPU voltage under 1.8V, or
if you can figure out the jumpers for a higher voltage (they are
undocumented and I don't know). Following adapter is one I had
in a motherboard that supported Coppermines but allowed using
Tualatins. Board was a Via 694X chipset, and other 694X
chipsetted boards also worked, but a cheap miniATX Sis 620
chipset board wouldn't work.
http://www.tigersurplus.com/details.htm?productid=4B-1202
Backtrack to their homepage to order it, the 'site isn't very
laid out in that regard,
http://www.tigersurplus.com/
What is the differentiator between Tualatin and Coppermine - is it the
.13, .18 respectively? But what functional differences (voltage?)
causes the newer Tualatins to not be happy on older boards?
Yes the Tualatins were .13 and the L2 cache on the Celerons was
doubled, so a 1.4GHz Celeron was effectively the same as if a
PIII Coppermine could run at 1.4GHz (albeit on 100MHz FSB).
Tualatin PIII can in both same amount of L2 cache as the
Celerons and againt doubled, but they were so expensive to be
cost-prohibitive, best used in a 1U rackmount server instead of a
PC.
The other difference was of a few pin positions, Intel purposely
designed it to be (barely) pin-incompatible even though it used
same socket. Some boards can use both Coppermine and Tualatin
because those boards are engineered to overcome this, but I don't
know exactly how they accomplish it.
Too risky for me ;o) but it does have the last BIOS ABit offered from
a couple years ago.
THe BIOS on the board shows values between 1.3V and 2.3V in 0.05V
increments.
Well then, your having a good brand of motherboard may've paid
off, it is most likely you can just use the cheap slotket adapter
I linked above, or if you're adventurous and daring, it "might"
be possible to hack out a way to run a Tualatin on our board
without even an adapter.
http://www.geocities.com/_lunchbox/tualeron_zm6_mod.html
Look around the rest of that website and the links, there is a
lot of good info about not only a Tualatin mod for your board,
but pin differences and using Coppermines on BX/ZX, etc.
I can pick up a Lin-Lin 370 adapter for between $1-$7 from compgeeks
or ebay or whatever. I don't know offhand what Celerons are running
but probably $10-$20ish in the 850...10000 speed range - just a guess.
OK, I now realize that the Lin-Lin is probably the exact same
adapter I linked above.
Yes yes and yes! If I can do this on a cheap w/ a Celeron it might be
worth popping for a cheapo Celeron but on second thought it's not
worth the added expense of a PIII. Those are all valid bottlenecks on
a ZM6.
BTW Any good boards you like from say recent years? ABit VH6T?
My experience with boards starting out with native Tualatin
support is limited, because I had a bunch of Coppermine
Compatible boards already and through mods or adapter they ran
Tualatins. Now I only have one or two Tualatin-based systems
left. However, the change to support Tualatin was very minor
from a motherboard manufacturer's perspective, if a given company
made a Coppermine-supportive board that received good reviews,
it's a good bet that their later Tualatin-compatible version is
the same good board reborn. By the time Tualatins became
somewhat common the industry had moved on to popularizing Athlons
because they had a small performance lead, as it is so often in
the industry only the "winner" gets the glory. So there were
many reviews and users with the Coppermine era boards but fewer
with Tualatin supportive version.
Similarly I also moved on to Athlons but it was also partly
because near same cost Athlon could be overclocked to much
higher performance.
Overclocking is an issue though, Some Tualatins overclocked
pretty well, it was common to buy a 1-1.1GHz and expect it to run
on 133MHz FSB as 1.3-1.4GHz @ roughly 1.65V with only a modest,
cheap, quiet heatsink.
Basically you should be OK choosing any of the major name brands
like Gigabyte, MSI, Asus, Abit. Just investigate whether the
board's bios or jumpers provide o'c settings if you'd like to use
any. As I mentioned the typical target o'c would need settings
for only 133MHz FSB and 1.65V... some only needed 1.6, others
1.7, but that's the range needed.
Heh heh - this old board and periphs are probably pretty well maxed
out at 100.
It was pretty popular for a while, since a BX board overclocked
to 133MHz was faster than the alternatives that came after it, at
least until manufacturers started tweaking the BIOS on the Via
694X based boards.
I don't recall offhand but I think on my BIOS I need to be able to set
the multiplier in BIOS to 'agree' w/ the chip is all. Otherwise it
won't be happy w/ a mismatch w/ the chips locked multiplier...?
I don't know. Usually there is an "auto" setting but I don't
recall any specifics about that board. Since the "lunchbox" site
I linked above shows the mod for Tualatins, I have to assume it
worked, somehow without anything difficult enough to need
mentioned, else the whole mod would be pointless, not exist on
the 'site. One way or the other it should work but if this is
your only system the problem becomes doing the research to
resolve a problem if the system is down.
