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Pentium II 200MHz?!?

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First post, by VivienM

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Another weird sighting from hunting for Pentiums on eBay. There's a system being sold there that has a Pentium II 200MHz, complete with a photo of a BIOS screen saying Pentium II 200MHz. Largeish OEM system too.

How is that possible?! The obvious theory I thought of would be that someone dropped a 100FSB processor into a 66FSB mobo, but there was never a 300MHz 3x100 PIII according to Wikipedia, only a 4.5x66.

Reply 1 of 6, by Thandor

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Not all Pentium II’s are multiplier locked so it might be just a multiplier setting.

thandor.net - hardware
And the rest of us would be carousing the aisles, stuffing baloney.

Reply 2 of 6, by ux-3

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FSB66 multi 3x.
I can realize this with two of my Pentium2 CPUs.

Retro PC warning: The things you own end up owning you.

Reply 3 of 6, by Many Bothans

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Not rare, just misconfigured.

  • Zenith Z386SX-20, 8MB FPM, Video 7 1024i, Unhoused
  • AOpen AP43, Am5x86-133@160, 1MB L2, 128MB FPM, Stealth III S540 32MB Savage4, SB32
  • ITX-Llama, 3Dfx V3
  • Asus CUV4X-E, P3-933, 512MB PC133, Hercules 3D Prophet II MX 32MB, SB Live!

Reply 4 of 6, by VivienM

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So then I guess my next question is... can we guess what the real CPU speed in there is?

And actually, answering my own question - there's a sticker at the back with a -266 suffix. So presumably it's a 266 with the multiplier set to 3X instead of 4X?

Reply 5 of 6, by ux-3

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VivienM wrote on 2024-09-01, 18:41:

So then I guess my next question is... can we guess what the real CPU speed in there is?

Sure: 200 MHz, at the time the picture was taken.

But you want to know what the print on the cpu will say. Afaik, anything between 233 and 400 Mhz.
(I have not yet seen a 450 MHz P2 with limited multi, but perhaps some exist)

Retro PC warning: The things you own end up owning you.

Reply 6 of 6, by Babasha

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My Asus P3B-F and unlocked P2 266MHz was downclocked as low as 133MHz)))

Need help? Begin with photo and model of your hardware 😉