First post, by murrayman
This is regarding my Compaq Presario 5170, the one in my sig currently listed with the PII 350. The board has a 440BX chipset, but as far as the BIOS is concerned, I'm pretty certain it doesn't officially support Pentium III, only Pentium II. It's REALLY difficult to find any info regarding the BIOS for this system, the only thing I know is that it's version 686I3, dated 08/1998 - a good half year before the first SL35E released.
Nevertheless, I wanted to try sticking in a 500MHz PIII SL35E. Has the same FSB and voltage as the outgoing 350MHz PII SL2U4. Correctly changed the jumpers on the motherboard to match the correct multiplier for the CPU per the service manual, and lo and behold, it booted! Win98SE, Everest, etc all recognize the CPU correctly.
So then I tried playing Descent 3. The first couple of minutes of play were fine, but then the game started changing my secondary weapon every few seconds at random. Wasn't on an interval or anything, it just happened spontaneously every so often. Not an issue with my joystick or keyboard - tried swapping those out just in case. But the issue does consistently occur now when running the game.
Then, there was one time when Windows was booting, and as it was getting ready to load the desktop proper, two errors popped up - one regarding a DLL missing, and another saying explorer.exe crashed and Windows needed to be reinstalled. Did a simple reboot, and it booted just fine the second time around.
So, there's something up clearly. This system's never given me issues of any sort. Does this sound like a CPU-to-motherboard compatibility issue, or perhaps a faulty CPU? Can a CPU "work" on a motherboard at all like this if it's not explicitly compatible? I tried to find an answer via Google and here, and couldn't find anything conclusive - at least regarding Deschutes and Katmai-based Pentiums.
P3B-F 1.04, PIII 1k, 512MB PC133, GF DDR 32MB + DM3DII 12MB SLI, SB0100
P3B-F 1.03, PIII 700, 384MB PC100, V5 AGP, SB0160
CP 5170, PII 350, 256MB PC100, Rage LT 2MB, ESS 1869
PB M S610, PMMX 233, 128MB EDO66, DM3D 4MB, Aztech
