Anyone "upgraded" a Dell LX board to Celery 500a ?

[Brent]

I have a friend who is happy with his Dell with an Intel/Dell branded LX based motherboard and PII 233 but I saw somewhere once that you can flash the mobo with the appropriate Intel BIOS (Phoenix) to be able to run a nice fast Celeron. The LX chipset is compatible and independent LX mobo manufacturers have kept pace with BIOS updates to recognise the latest speed Celerons. Has anyone succeeded with a Dell in doing this? (The Dell released BIOS upgrades only support up to a PII 333.)
The other worry is that you would need a Slot 370 adapter.

[Jonesy @ work]

As soon as I can afford the chip I will do so.

Get a Powerleap adapter, the others are flaky. Many have had total success. You need to do a recovery flash of the BIOS to the latest Intel.

Have a look here: http://home.earthlink.net/~billselk/.../slockets.html

HTH!

Jonesy

[Brent]

Thanks for the feedback Jonesy,
I will pass this on to my mate. It looks pretty good to me. I will just have to track down the Powerleap.
BTW-Does a P14 BIOS apply to all Dell machines past and present. Is it like a Matrox unified BIOS that automatically detects what hardware you are attempting to flash?
Cheers
Brent

[Jonesy @ work]

The powerleap is available in the UK from
GD Distribution:
Tel :01270-258200
Fax : 01270-251737

As for the BIOS...
make sure yer man has the latest Dell BIOS as that will make the jump less drastic.

He then needs to do a flash in recovery mode (changing the jumper settings and updating with no video :-) ).

It will not work unless he does a recovery flash, then a normal flash as the Intel BIOS chokes when it sees the Dell one. The recovery flash will strip the Dell info, then the full flash will see the recovered BIOS, assume the cards an Intel (non-Dell) and hey presto!

The Celeron 500 is about £110 now and the PL is about £25. That's what I call a cheap upgrade!!

Tell him to lurk in the intel.microprocessors.celeron NG. There are loads of folks who have done this and the only failures tend to be the slocket's fault (no faults reported with the Powerleap however).

Cheers

Jonesy


[This message has been edited by Jonesy @ work (edited 29 November 1999).]

[Brent]

Thanks a lot Jonesy,
I am just not sure what model Intel board he has. Someone like AOpen would probably have about half a dozen LX boards. How can I be sure to identify which model Intel LX he has to get the relevant BIOS?
Cheers-Brent