Old Thrashbarg wrote:

Not like Dell. At least some of the computer makers used standard ATX power supplies, motherboards and cases.

That's a bit of a selective memory, there. Most of the midrange/highend Dell systems were pretty close to standard during the late Pentium - PIII era. There was the different power supply pinout, but in their tower machines it was still a regular ATX size and was pretty easily adaptable to a standard PSU. People seem to forget about those systems, though... most of the Dell talk around here centers on Optiplexes, which have never been standard and were never intended to be upgraded much (though you can still do quite a bit with them, even so).

Dells are also pretty good about CPU upgrades... You can even slap a Tualatin (with adapter) in most of their PII/PIII machines and it'll run without complaint. Compare that to the Compaqs which will usually complain if you even try to use a later stepping of chip from the same architecture.

That was because of the chipset more than anything else. the 440BX chipset was probably the best thing to ever come out of intel. And it wasn't until the 815 and the p4 did it get replaced.

Slot 1/S370 was such a long and successful platform its silly. And it started with the pentium pro. There exists (its rare) a socket 370 to socket 8 converter that allows you to run 66mhz celeron chips in a pentium pro motherboard. hell, the p-pro overdrive is nothing but a p2 with better cache! I have a pair of pentium pro to slot one converter cards, And they will post in just about every slot 1 system I try. Most however panic and crap the bed during post because they dont know how to deal with the p-pro but the boards with the bios support (ex: Tyan S1686) do. Its just the same as the Asus p2b-d, 440bx chipset. designed for the 1st and 2nd generation pentium 2. Turns out with a simple modification to some cleap slot 1 adapters, you can run everything up through the 1.5ghz tualatin. http://tipperlinne.com/p2bmod.html

That was because of the chipset more than anything else. the 440BX chipset was probably the best thing to ever come out of intel. And it wasn't until the 815 and the p4 did it get replaced.

You're talking about something completely different.

What I was referring to was the fact that some OEMs, Compaq especially, had BIOS lockouts on their boards. For example, I have a Compaq i810 board out of a Deskpro, came with a 600mhz Coppermine, A2 stepping I believe. It throws an error on boot if I put in anything later than an A2 stepping chip... and since most faster PIIIs are B0 or later, it's pretty well stuck with the original CPU.

Its not hard to mod a bios. its done ALL THE TIME. the link in my last post touched on it. Also, it was common for some OEMs to use "Aftermarket" boards and just re-brand them for their own use. HP did this A LOT, in fact I think they still do. They just use re-branded Asus boards. And 95% of the time, the asus bios will work in the "HP" board. Sony did this as well. Now dell, diddnt from the systems I've seen, but the idea is the same.

The major point I was trying to make was, that as long as things were electrically compatible, there was an upgrade solution, regardless of the oem trying to make it otherwise.

Old Thrashbarg wrote:

That was because of the chipset more than anything else. the 440BX chipset was probably the best thing to ever come out of intel. And it wasn't until the 815 and the p4 did it get replaced.

You're talking about something completely different.

What I was referring to was the fact that some OEMs, Compaq especially, had BIOS lockouts on their boards. For example, I have a Compaq i810 board out of a Deskpro, came with a 600mhz Coppermine, A2 stepping I believe. It throws an error on boot if I put in anything later than an A2 stepping chip... and since most faster PIIIs are B0 or later, it's pretty well stuck with the original CPU.

Dell's do the same thing. If you try to update the BIOS in my GX1's past revision A07, you can't use CPU's faster than about 600mhz in them because the multipliers needed to go higher are no longer supported.

But the difference is that you have the option not to upgrade the BIOS, and A05 works just as well as any later version on the GX1 so you don't really lose anything by sticking with the older version. The Compaq board I'm talking about has such a lockout on all BIOS versions.

Thanks for the feedback, I have done 1 and 5, I will order number 4 this week. In regard to number 2 it will only take a 266, and I don't want mess with stock-ness of it, and the HDD is pletny I think for Quake and the few games I will run on it. BTW this post is typed on this system. Thanks everyone eals for your post's. Very very helpful as always.

sgt76 wrote:

Ooo, that's a lovely machine you got there, real clean and original. I'd hate to mess with such a nice stock machine, so if it […]
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Ooo, that's a lovely machine you got there, real clean and original. I'd hate to mess with such a nice stock machine, so if it were mine I'd just do the following:

1) More ram: 128-192mb
2) Maybe, just maybe a faster Klamath processor.
3) A larger faster hard disk
4) A Voodoo 3
5) Get a pci slot fan - this works real well on old cases with no standard fan ports.

That's it.