dionb wrote:
First-up: that board has the SiS 5591 chipset. It's SiS' attempt at a Via VP3-competitor and it actually beat it - you can generally get the 5591 stable up to about 90MHz (where the VP3 became flaky around 83MHz), maybe even up to 95MHz. Just not 100MHz... by the time SiS figured out how to do that, they'd decided against AGP and discrete VGA on So7 and went with fully integrated SiS 530 and 540.
That's crazy, considering "stock," speeds are around 66MHz. I had no idea this motherboard was even somewhat capable of that, I find that quite interesting. The 64MB of RAM I'm using is PC-100 (I don't have a legit 64MB PC-66 stick), so if I push it up, the RAM will happily hum along.
dionb wrote:So, 83MHz is pretty much guaranteed, 95MHz *might* work. Translate that to your CPUs: whatever a vendor advertised in terms of max FSB and max clock should work, more might. AMD K6-2 CXT CPUs (>400MHz) interpret a 2x multiplier as 6x, and as 6x83MHz=500MHz, you can run them at that. Get a K6-2 500 and you can run it within spec at full speed. But before you do that, see what your P55C can do. It runs at 3x66MHz; you can try 3x83MHz=250MHz, or even 3x95MHz=285MHz. If the multiplier is unlocked it could do 3.5x83MHz=292MHz or if you are very lucky with both CPU and motherboard 3.5x95MHz=333MHz. At 333MHz, the P55C is a beast. I have run one at 350MHz on a different motherboard (DFI MVP3-based board), so it can be done, but that's unusual, 292MHz is probably the highest you could expect. Still, that will give you a good 40% boost in CPU, and 25% boost in cache and RAM. I know I would have done it in 1998 😉
I've FSB overclocked before (Core2Quad Q9550 build- pushed it up from 2.83GHz to 3.8GHz stable, and ran the DDR2 RAM at 1066MHz, though it was rated for that), so doing it again, albeit, on a much smaller scale shouldn't be too hard. I'm going to start lower, probably at the official rated speed of 75MHz (at least, for the chipset), and then go up to 83MHz, and then push it to 95MHz. If all remains stable, and the CPU has an unlocked multiplier, I'll start playing with that until it gets pissy and forces me to go down to the last stable speed(s).
dionb wrote:But tbh, if you already have an early P3, there's no point whatsoever trying to bump this system up to near-P3 performance. Keep that nice P55C and let this thing do what it is good at: run 16b code (DOS or early Windows) extremely well 😀
As much as I love that PIII, until I can get it more time-accurate parts, this is what I've got for this sort of thing. I need to get a ~1998 Slot 1 motherboard, a Katmai Pentium III or a Deschutes PII, a bigger time-accurate ATA-66 HDD (I'm at 6.4GB at the moment), a time-accurate CD-ROM, a real SB Live! (I have an SB Live! value in it), a Promise ATA-66 PCI controller- nearly everything inside that system needs to be changed out to make it a really good time-accurate HL1 smasher. I may or may not keep my RIVA TNT2 32MB, because I already have it and that thing is a beast. Quake III at 1024x768 at ~50-60fps level stuff, from what I remember.
dionb wrote:
Edit:
And as for Musk, he blew the top off a tin can this morning, so wouldn't expect too much from there anytime soon (although that Starship looks like something straight out of Dan Dare, would be bloody amazing if it managed to fly, particularly if it did so as cheaply and reliably as promised). I'd rather recommend sticking the CPU in a jam jar and throwing it into the sea somewhere with a westward current. Of course that does require you to be within easy reach of the eastern seaboard of the US, and possessing considerable patience 😜
I've not really been caught up on the new space-y stuff, last big thing I heard was the Falcon launch and what is technically the fastest speeds a car has achieved, maybe not on land, but the speeds things travel at in space are enormous, so it has the world record for fastest speed traveled by car somewhere, so I'm quite a bit out of the loop in regards to that.
Sending it on a western-bound current is too vague, it could end up in Canada or Mexico for all I know, may not even end up landing in the country, let alone a part of the eastern seaboard I can readily access. If it gets in the hands of the wrong people, they'll use the technologies contained within it to create a weapon of mass destruction of some kind. Wasn't it iTunes or something similar that had a clause in its ToS where it said you couldn't use it to aid in the creation of nuclear weapons or something crazy like that?