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Coppermine FCPGA on PPGA370 LX

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First post, by andrea

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Hello to all,
I'm working on a new chapter in the "Playing around with stuff that was cheap shit€ when new, much less 20 years after, and making it do things it was never designed for" series.

I have a MSI MS-6160 (440LX, socket PPGA370 (Mendocino only), VRM supports coppermine Vcore) that I'd like to fit with a Coppermine Celeron. In order to do so I've done the "classic" socket mod as seen in, for example, http://krick.3feetunder.com/370mod/.
Now it kinda works but not really: It posts and tries to boot but it's very flakey. In windows 9x it's very crashy, and NT variants freeze hard during boot*
In a weak attempt at troubleshooting I've noticed that if i disable the 2nd level cache it works well (as well as a cacheless machine can work). This made me wonder if additional socket mods are needed, not unlike those discovered here for Tillamooks on TX or K6s on Aladdins. Does anyone know if such a thing exists?

I must also add that I don't think it's a bios issues, as it behaves the same with:

  • the one and only bios release MSI did (w660ms10.bin)
  • the same bios patched with ROM.by's utility
  • MS6159 (It's pretty much the same board, except for an onboard Rage Pro instead of the AGP slot) bios, I've tried different releases
  • Gigabyte 6LMM7's latest bios. This one is supposed to support coppermines for certain.

Thank you to all and have a nice evening 😀

*W2K, for example, starts to boot up in text mode and then when the "Starting Windows" bar is full the machines freezes, right before the switch to graphical mode. XP does the same.

Reply 1 of 9, by Deksor

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Hey that's interesting ! I have two AT slot 1 mobos with i440LX/EX chipset and they don't POST with a coppermine celeron in a slotcket. I modded the bios, but it's not working at the moment, if I modify the socket then it might work ! 😁

Are you sure the mobo is supplying the correct voltage to the CPU ?

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Reply 2 of 9, by andrea

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Yup Vcore is right. Just to be sure I've also done a quick and dirty voltmod (a trimmer between Vsense and gnd on the voltage controller IC) to bump the voltage up a little but that did not help either.
(although it allowed me to run a 466 celeron at 580, but that's another story)

Reply 3 of 9, by Tetrium

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Iirc my first Celeron 400 build was build around an MS-6159 and I loved it 😁

About your instability. I don't know as I never tried this mod myself, but perhaps it's more the VRMs that are having trouble with the downvolt?
This was kinda a common problem with board of that time, so it might be related.

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Reply 4 of 9, by andrea

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Tetrium wrote:

About your instability. I don't know as I never tried this mod myself, but perhaps it's more the VRMs that are having trouble with the downvolt?
This was kinda a common problem with board of that time, so it might be related.

How bad of an idea would be to run a Cumine at 2 volts, at least for testing purposes?

Reply 5 of 9, by Skyscraper

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Coppermine CPUs have no issues with running at 2.0V, be sure to use some decent thermal paste.

The lowest voltage non Coppermine capable P6 VRM designs support are normally 1.8V though and many boards like yours supports the full Coppermine voltage range.

You can still try 2.0V just to see if it improves the stability, pehaps the caps are a bit "tiered"...

New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.

Reply 6 of 9, by andrea

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I must correct myself, after a few tests I've realised that the cache that must be disabled in order for the system to work is the L1 (or whatever the bios calls "CPU Internal Cache"), not the L2 as stated in the OP. Sorry.
Anyway, even with 2,05V no change. Also the caps have been changed. They aren't new but they aren't the OE Chhsi either.

Reply 7 of 9, by Skyscraper

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I would try another Coppermine CPU.

New PC: i9 12900K @5GHz all cores @1.2v. MSI PRO Z690-A. 32GB DDR4 3600 CL14. 3070Ti.
Old PC: Dual Xeon X5690@4.6GHz, EVGA SR-2, 48GB DDR3R@2000MHz, Intel X25-M. GTX 980ti.
Older PC: K6-3+ 400@600MHz, PC-Chips M577, 256MB SDRAM, AWE64, Voodoo Banshee.

Reply 9 of 9, by Daniël Oosterhuis

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For what it's worth, I tried that same pinmod on an ASUS S370-L Slotket (this one being early enough to be meant for Mendocinos only), and while it booted XP fine on my ASUS P2B Rev 1.10, it would hard crash when opening the Start Menu or opening Explorer windows. Eventually got an MSI Master Rev 2 Slotket and the issues went away. I wonder if that pinmod is really enough for Coppermines to properly work on certain boards.

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