VOGONS


First post, by iulianv

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I'm about to purchase a LuckyStar TURBO-370 adapter - it has five 3-pin voltage jumpers that allow from 3.5V down to 1.35V and one jumper labeled "TURBO 66".

There's not much info that I could find about it - best match would be the thread below, but I don't understand much from Google's translation (it seems to be Danish) - maybe someone can help me figure out what exactly the "TURBO 66" jumper does and in the end what CPUs the adapter supports.

Thanks.

http://www.ezz.dk/195065-konverter-slot-370-pins-luckystar

Reply 1 of 12, by Tetrium

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A pic of the slotket would help 😉

Many support only PPGA Celeron and/or only work with Coppermines if the original motherboard supports Coppermines also.

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Reply 2 of 12, by iulianv

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Tetrium wrote:

A pic of the slotket would help 😉

Many support only PPGA Celeron and/or only work with Coppermines if the original motherboard supports Coppermines also.

Attached (beware, 2.4 megs in size 😀).

Motherboard is no issue - I have two slot1 boards at home (both dual, both Coppermine-friendly) - but I'm wondering why bother to provide as low as 1.35V and only support PPGA Celeron (or even Coppermine) - such voltages immediately bring Tualatin to mind... I was really hoping someone could clearly translate that Danish thread for me, there's a post there that seems to contain useful info 😀.

Reply 3 of 12, by Tetrium

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It "seems" to be nothing but basically a standard 370 to slot 1 converter with options for setting the voltage (perhaps for overclocking?).

Theres basically not much about them, except it will probably work with PPGA Celerons and maybe with Coppermines.
Have you tried it yet?
And what were you thinking about about using it?

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Reply 4 of 12, by Old Thrashbarg

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Nope, that's not a Tualatin card, just Celerons and Coppermines.

I'm sure the really low and really high voltage settings are just incidental. S370 and Slot1 have five VID pins, supporting a range of settings far greater than were ever actually used, but to support all the settings between 1.5V and 1.85V all those pins need to be available. So, since they had all the VID pins connected anyway, they just went ahead and printed the diagram for the full range of voltage settings, even though most of 'em won't actually be used in practice.

And the Turbo 66 jumper is almost certainly for switching a 66mhz Celeron into 100fsb mode. That was a standard feature on pretty much all Slotkets.

Reply 5 of 12, by iulianv

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Well, I gues I'll test it after getting it tomorrow and see what happens (I also have a Tualatin Celeron around somewhere)... I'll "pair" it with an 850MHz P3 and it's part of a package that also includes a GeForce 256 SDR with TV-out, a Matrox G100, an ATI Rage Pro with memory upgrade (also with TV-out) and a boxed Katmai/450 - around 7 EUR for all of them.

Reply 6 of 12, by sliderider

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iulianv wrote:

Well, I gues I'll test it after getting it tomorrow and see what happens (I also have a Tualatin Celeron around somewhere)... I'll "pair" it with an 850MHz P3 and it's part of a package that also includes a GeForce 256 SDR with TV-out, a Matrox G100, an ATI Rage Pro with memory upgrade (also with TV-out) and a boxed Katmai/450 - around 7 EUR for all of them.

Don't be surprised if a Tualatin PIII doesn't work with that slocket adapter. Tualatin uses a different voltage than earlier socket 370 chips and a 133FSB. You'll probably be limited to Coppermine PIII's with it. With only a 100FSB even if you can match the voltage for a Tualatin PIII, it won't run full speed. A PIII 1400, for example, would only run at 1050mhz (10.5 multiplier x 100FSB) so it's not worth wasting a Tualatin when there are Coppermines that can do that speed. A Tualeron might work, if you can match the voltage, because they are made to run on a 100mhz bus. A 1400 Tualeron has a 14x multi so you'd still get 1.4ghz speed out of it.

Reply 7 of 12, by feipoa

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At around 2004-ish times, I did many tests with slocket adapters, but was never able to obtain much longterm stability out of them.

I even tried some expensive ones from Powerleap at the time (~$150 per adapter) in a dual CPU configuration, but the system would crash every 5-7 days of uptime. I also did tests using a 1.4 GHz Celeron in a single CPU configuration on a different motherboard, but the system also crashed every few days.

Some slockets I tested didn't even result in a booting computer. I hope you have better luck than I did.

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Reply 8 of 12, by Tetrium

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It could be that either the higher-end CPU's were simply too much for those old boards to handle (many were made when P2 was still around) or the extra length of the electrical traces from the CPU to the rest of the system was causing the instabilities.

Or...the slotkets were simply made of lesser quality

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Reply 9 of 12, by iulianv

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Speaking of voltage jumpers on slotkets, what do they do exactly? I mean, I don't see any VRM components on this slotket, so I'm thinking that maybe the jumpers don't actually change voltages, but somehow select them...

That is, if the mainboard's lower limit is, say, 1.8V and I set the slotket's jumpers for 1.45V, what voltage will the CPU receive?

Reply 10 of 12, by Old Thrashbarg

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I mean, I don't see any VRM components on this slotket, so I'm thinking that maybe the jumpers don't actually change voltages, but somehow select them...

As I said before, they're tied to the VID pins on the motherboard. The VID pins being the method the CPU uses to tell the motherboard its default voltage.

If you set the card for 1.45V when the motherboard only supports 1.8V, you might get 1.8V, or you might get something much higher than 1.8V, depending on how the motherboard responds to unrecognized VID settings.

Reply 11 of 12, by Tetrium

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To add to what Old Trashbarg already said, the jumpers on the slotket basically "send the motherboard a binary number". On the slotket it may say a particular "binary number" results in a certain voltage, but theres no guarantee that the motherboard itself will interpret that "binary number" as the same voltage as printed on the cheapy slotket adapter.

You can compare it to the remapping of multiplier pins in some Socket 7 CPU's.
If you set your Pentium to 1.5x, it'll run at 1.5x the FSB. But set a Pentium MMX at the same 1.5x and it'll run at 3.5x the FSB!

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Reply 12 of 12, by feipoa

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Tetrium, you are probably right considering how one particular machine would be flakely using 1.0 GHz slot1 CPUs but not 850 MHz ones.

Maybe at speeds higher than the BIOS/MB is rated for (like 1.4 GHz) some extra wait state is needed? Unfortunately, a lot of these features were taken away from more modern BIOSs.

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