quicknick wrote:

Cheers to all!

So I got this motherboard a few days ago, it came with a Celeron-533 and some cooler (not pictured). There are a number of caps missing (broken off the board, their legs still dangling there), and a few more that are severely bent and with at least one leg pulled off. So in order to restore this I think it's going to need a full recap. Problem is, from what I gathered from the 'net, this board only supports Celerons (is that even possible?), and I have no use for a Celeron-only board. I have no experience with Intel platforms newer than Socket 7, so I don't know what would happen if I toss on this board the only other So370 CPU that I have, a Piii-1266 Tualatin.

Of course it's possible that a board only supports Celerons. Intel's So370 platform went through three iterations, PPGA, FC-PGA and FC-PGA2. Each version was backwards compatible with the previous version (so you could run PPGA CPUs on FC-PGA boards and FC-PGA CPUs on FC-PGA2 boards) but not forwards compatible (so you can't run anything other than PPGA CPUs on a PPGA board).

PPGA was only used by the PPGA Celeron Mendocino CPUs, and this is an So370 PPGA board. Now, it's possible to hack the socket to allow FC-PGA CPUs to run anyway, but you then also need to worry about supported voltages (FC-PGA used significantly lower voltage than PPGA) and BIOS support. Tbh, not worth it. If you don't want to run Mendocino Celeron's, don't use this board.

That said, the Mendocino Celeron was a legendary CPU in its time, with the early version overclocking massively to 100MHz FSB and frequently outperforming the Katmai P3 at the same speed. For a mid 1999 build, this board with a Celeron 300A@450MHz or 333A@500MHz would be top of the bill.

I've read tales of coppermines smoking these ppga boards but couldn't say for sure.

Like dionb said though, I'd recap that sucker and drop in the legendary Celeron 300A just for the nostalgia. Usually at stock or very tiny vcore bump it will do 450mhz, and the cache runs at the cpu frequency on the 300A so you'll bench and game just like a pentium 3 450.

It looks like those caps were just bent from something stacked on top of the board, so hopefully it still works and wasn't the victim of a youngster 😜

It's a PPGA only board. PPGA is NOT compatible with FC-PGA chips.

CPU support list: https://www.asus.com/supportonly/MEB/HelpDesk_CPU/
Manual: https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/sock370 … meb/meb-101.pdf

It's a weird one. The only PPGA only boards I have come across were either VIA or LX (IIRC) chipsets limited to 66Mhz officially. BX is an odd one here, as there were never 100MHz FSB CPUs made for PPGA.

However, PPGA chips are not overly expensive and it might be feasible to overclock some with a 100MHz FSB. 600-650 MHz should be doable with a slight Vcore bump and a decent cooler.

Psst, Abit BP6... 😉

Definitely the most legendary PPGA board. What it has in common with this one is that if you combine BX with PPGA, you're doing it for the enthousiast overclocking crowd.

Thank you for the info. I think I'll keep the board and recap it some day, and maybe a legendary 300A will come my way 😀
Now, if someone has this board, I really need to know the values of CE15 and CE19 in the VRM section. They are completely gone, and all I can tell from pictures found on the net is that they are larger than the others (which all seem to be 1000uF/6.3V).

quicknick wrote:

Cheers to all!

So I got this motherboard a few days ago, it came with a Celeron-533 and some cooler (not pictured). There are a number of caps missing (broken off the board, their legs still dangling there), and a few more that are severely bent and with at least one leg pulled off. So in order to restore this I think it's going to need a full recap. Problem is, from what I gathered from the 'net, this board only supports Celerons (is that even possible?), and I have no use for a Celeron-only board. I have no experience with Intel platforms newer than Socket 7, so I don't know what would happen if I toss on this board the only other So370 CPU that I have, a Piii-1266 Tualatin.

ASUS MEB.jpg

I think it's worthwhile keeping this board around.
It's not the most flexible though, as Celerons came multiplier locked (except perhaps the rare ES).
I've used a µATX s370 LX board with great satisfaction for years. Mine had a 400MHz Mendocino in it.
This platform is easy to work with and should be a stable platform once repaired properly.

Like Dionb already explained, there are basically 3 different iterations of this CPU socket, though backward compatibility was not always guaranteed.

MEB is the BX variant, where the MEL was the LX variant. Then there is also the ASUS MEL-B and MEL-C, for if you really wanna spice things up 😁

Edit:
I just realized that the M or ME stands for Mendocino. Or at least it would make perfect sense when looking at their other offerings like CU* (Coppermine, or Cu which is short name of the chemical element copper) and TU* (Tualatin). You learn something new every day 🤣!