Newbie. Help required.

[Smalltown_Hero]

Hi, being new to this I need answers to a few questions so please bear with me. I am currently running a P3 450 on a Superpower mobo and want to upgrade. My mobo has bus clock settings from 66-133MHz and frequency ratio multipliers up to 8 times. I was thinking of going to a Celeron as faster P3's are too expensive and would mean me upgrading my PC100 ram as well. Am I right in thinking that a Celeron 800 is as far as I can upgrade on this mobo or are there any tweaks which will allow a faster chip to be fitted. If not would there be much of a difference between the P3 450 and a Celeron 800.
Thanks for listening, any help appreciated

[BigRed]

if you can find a bios flash for your motherboard it will support any coppermine cpu and any celeron (except the tutalain cpus of course)
the fastest celeron you can get for that motherboard would be a 1.1ghz celeron, but you are going to need a slocket adapter for a new processor to work in that motherboard.
and if you are just going to go with a celeron you can stay with your pc100 ram, but if you want to overclock the celeron you should get some pc133 :)
and there will be A LOT of difference between a p3 450 and a celeron 800 :)

[Smalltown_Hero]

Thanks for the quick response, but you lost me somewhat. I found a flash upgrade for the bios from A3 to A4 but what does this actually do as the bios looks much the same as before. Also
how would I configure the mobo to take the Celeron 1.1G. Is it just a case of setting the highest multiplier of 8 and upping the bus clock.

[BigRed]

well you would need a slocket adapter (socket 370 to slot 1) and you just adjust the settings on the slocket.
i take it you adjust the fsb and multiplyer on the motherboard, that complcates things.
i dont know if it will work if you throw a 1.1ghz celeron in there (and make sure you buy the coppermine one, not the tutalain). if you set the fsb to 100 and the multiplyer to the higest setting the 1.1 *might* work, because intel has locked multiplyers and the processor might force the proper multiplyer but it might not. read the readme of your bios update and see if it adds support for any higher multiplyers, if not you might be stuck at a celeron 800mhz, but then again its not that bad :)
would you happen to know what chipset you have on your motherboard?

[Smalltown_Hero]

Chipset is Via 693 A.