HandOfFate wrote on 2020-09-06, 14:48:Well, it is a Pentium III 500MHz alright. There is one type of socket (that I didn't know about) that was used for high-end Pent […]
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Well, it is a Pentium III 500MHz alright. There is one type of socket (that I didn't know about) that was used for high-end Pentium II's and low-end Pentium III mobile CPUs: MMC-2. HWINFO mentions this socket and a benchmark reveals that the CPU performs at 50% the speed of a P3 1GHz. So that's that.
What does worry me still is the heat it produces. Unfortunately there are no internal sensors that I can read out (the fan is temperature controlled but programs I tried didn't find anything) so I'm not sure if it's getting dangerously warm.
I've thought about putting the P2 366MHz CPU from the other Armada 1750 system board in here but on the other hand this is also cool: A Pentium III with an ESS ES1869, maximum performance with good DOS sound compatibility.
My only idea so far is to replace the spinning HDD with something solid state, probably a disk-on-module. That would remove one source of heat (and noise, the current one is noisy and slow)
Do any of you have any ideas of how I could limit the heat? Can I throttle the CPU somehow?
Ah yes, the MMC-1/MMC-2 modules - the time where Intel thought it’s a good idea to put the CPU and the northbridge onto a single module and sell it that way. Only Apple tried something similar with their CPU modules for the pre-Titanium PowerBooks.
As for the heat, It’ll be fine. I remembered reading blogs of people bragging about souping up their Armada 1750s with P3-500s - the difference in TDP is only from 13w on the Dixon P2 Mobiles to around 17w on the Coppermine P3s. What to do? Clean the fan more often, replace the default thermal compound with better ones and keep the air vents clear of obstructions. 4w of thermals over a 1-2 hour gaming session shouldn’t do much to kill the machine.
As for throttling? Well, this is before the Speedstep was implemented on the P3m, so the only thing you can do is turn off the L2 cache (a large part of the chip real estate).
As for spinner replacement, either go with an mSATA to IDE adapter, or use an SD to IDE adapter. With the mSATA you can probably go with a Kingspec or Venke, while with SD get something name brand like a Sandisk and with a Class 30/V2 rating - endurance is so-so but unless you are planning to use it 24/7, occasional retro-gaming would be fine (I use SDXC on my Thinkpad 560Es and the Thin Clients, and it does just fine). The SD to IDE adapter is internally limited to 25MB/sec transfer rates due to the architecture of the translation chip, but the latency is much better than the old spinners and ran much cooler. DMA is optional - some of the mSATA/SD bridge chips work well with it, some doesn’t.
Note that the southbridge component of the 440BX/ZX chipset common to MMC-2 module machine is restricted to LBA28, so no DMA operations to access anything over 137GB.