Help with..dual 850MHz celerons in a 440GX

[ALBPM]

A friend of a friend ran into some issues with the 440GX chipset can any of you guys help out???

Here's his story:

Ok, so I started out w/ a rather ambitious hack, inspired by the tales of the infamous bp6 dual ppga celeron and overclocker articles galore. The goal:

dual 850MHz celerons in a 440GX motherboard (the solid supermicro p6dgh). A long and convoluted story unfolded leading inevitably to failure.

The p6dgh is a dual slot one board designed, at best, for the pentium III katmai processor. These have 512K L2 cache running at half processor speed, happy around 2 volts, with 100MHz front side bus. The fastest of these
beasties run at 600MHz, I believe, and (due to dwindling supplies and high demand?) are becoming quite pricy.

Fortunately with their latest bios upgrade, Supermicro is claiming PIII coppermine support for these boards, with some limitations. First, the voltage regulators on many BX and GX boards do not go below 1.8volts, and many coppermines require 1.65-1.7 to be in spec.

Unfortunately, Supermicro is only claiming that a few of their BX and GX boards can support dual coppermines above 600MHz, due to the combination of
voltage regulator problems and the length of the traces on the boards between processors. The p6dgh is not on their short list of supported boards.

In addition, to my dismay, I have discovered that unlike their ppga
medocino(sp?) cousins, the coppermine Celerons have been completely butchered internally so that they do not run in SMP mode. With ppga Celerons, a simple rewiring w/ an adapter allowed them to run happily in smp mode, even with a slot one motherboard. Not so with the coppermine Celeron.
In addition to being crippled (in comparison w/ their PIII coppermine equivalent) with a 4 way associative L2 cache, instead of the 8 way in the PIII, they also appear to have changes in the core preventing SMP opperation. Doh!

So, with the world conspiring against me, it appears that my options to run my wonderfull gx board include getting 533MHz ppga celerons, getting actual 600MHz PIII katmai slot one processors, or getting 600MHz PIII coppermine
processors. My trusty iwill slocket II adapters will faithfully convert ppga celerons to slot one in smp mode, as well as convert the fc-pga coppermine PIII's to slot one.

Alarmingly, even a single coppermine celeron 850 refuses to post in my 440gx board at 1.7 or 1.8 volt or 66 or 100MHz fsb settings... Total bummer...

Paul

[ALBPM]

kerBump!!

[Maggi]

Hi Paul,

tell him to scrap that idea of using two CuMines.

What happens, if he tries Coppermines ?

As you know, run my Celery at 1.85 volts and default was 1.5, so tell him there's absolutely no need to worry aobut running a CPU a bit above specs ...

Also, it's not really clear if it's actually a Slot1 board, cos I thought all GX boards would need Slot2 CPUs.

[Wombat]

I'm pretty sure a friend of mine was running a single Slot1 in a GX board. He was planning to go dualie later.

[superfly]

That's a problem similar to what i went through to get 2 socket 370 coppermine p3's to work in a dual slot 1 board (supermicro P3DME).....

Even though my board supported the proper voltages for the cpu's and i used socket to slot adapters that were certified to work in dual cpu configs,the motherboard bios just plain refused to work with them,no matter how many different bios versions i tried.

I even manually set the multiplier and voltages settings on the socket 370 adapters directly and tried other brands of adapters as well,but it still didn't work either,so finally,i installed 2 slot 1 p3 933 and it worked great....


I think that even though the setup i tried had every chance of working,there may be some variation in the adapters that just did not allow the cpu's to be detected properly.