upgrading old gateway p3 550

I have an old gateway system that i got new in 1999 that i am wanting to turn into a fileserver/linux box, I was talking to a gateway tech about upgrading it, currently it has 640 megs of pc100 ram in it 2 x 256 and 1x128.

the chip is:
Intel 550 MHz SECC2 Slot 1 Pentium III Processor

the motherboard is
Intel (Tabor3) BX Motherboard R1

now the board specs say it can take a max of 384 megs of ram however, i currently have more than that in it. when i mentioned this to the pc tech he said that you can have more but it won't be utilized by the computer. is this correct?

I also am upgrading the chip to a slot 1 800mhz p3. when i mentioned whats the fastest chip i could put in there he said that there would be problems and to not even try. that i would have to flash my bios, mess with my multipliers and fsb settings and such and it would be too complicated blah blah.... but i do that anyway when i overclock. I just want to knof if what he is saying is correct, i already bought a 100fsb slot1 p3 800mhz that reads as follows. its on its way as we speak but anyway...

800/256/100/1.65v S1 00240525-0441 Costa Rica SL3XR.

will this work and will i have to reflash and mess with multipliers and settings?

Why do you need to upgrade? That's got more than enough power, unless you're putting the server under really really heavy load. I don't know your specific board, but since it looks like it supports the 100MHz FSB, you should be able to get the new processor to work. You may have trouble getting it to recoginse the new processor, if it's a substantially different core revision, which is why you might have to flash the BIOS. Flashing BIOSes isn't hard, but I imagine your eeprom chip is soldered onto the board, so a bad flash will just about kill it permanently. If you already have the new chip, give it a whirl, and see what happens.

If your current m/b supports Coppermine processors of any flavour then it should support the processor in question. The only real question is voltage, since 100MHz FSB obviously isn't an issue and the multiplier is locked anyway. But I agree that upgrading hardly seems justified under the circumstances. Unless the current processor is Katami, going from 550MHz to 800MHz isn't going to make a huge difference.

I don't understand why i wouldn't see a performance change going from 550mhz to 800mhz? and how do i know if my mb supports coppermine? does voltage differ that much between processors?

what is the fastest slot 1 p3 out right now? i got a slot 1 p3 450 (oc to 600 Mhz)

Rutkus said:

I don't understand why i wouldn't see a performance change going from 550mhz to 800mhz? and how do i know if my mb supports coppermine? does voltage differ that much between processors?

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I didn't say there wouldn't be a difference, I just said not a huge difference. The difference will be larger if you're going from a Katami to a Coppermine. Yes, the voltage difference is large, large enough that you could fry a Coppermine running it at Katami voltages. You'll have to check the possible voltage settings or otherwise research the m/b to determine the CPU / voltage support.

pvc_and_frost said:

what is the fastest slot 1 p3 out right now? i got a slot 1 p3 450 (oc to 600 Mhz)

Click to expand...

The fastest 'out right now'!?! Slot 1 is long obsolete. AFAIK, the fastest slot 1 in theory is 1.1GHz (Coppermine). I say in theory, because it will be quite a trick to find one. You can of course get a 'slocket' (an adapter card) that will allow you to use any socket 370 PIII / Celeron on a slot 1 m/b.

i'm still confused on how to determine what kind of a chip i bought? I have all the info about the chip in this post i think. how do i know if it is a coppermine or katami? is it just voltage? or how can you tell?

also i'm curious to my original ram situation, does anyone know to whether or not what that rep said was true?

Rutkus said:

i'm still confused on how to determine what kind of a chip i bought? I have all the info about the chip in this post i think. how do i know if it is a coppermine or katami? is it just voltage? or how can you tell?

also i'm curious to my original ram situation, does anyone know to whether or not what that rep said was true?

Click to expand...

The 'new' one (800MHz) is certainly a Coppermine. They didn't make Katami's that fast and they didn't make Tualatins that slow. Your existing 550MHz PIII might be either Katami or Tualatin. You might check the L2 cache, since I believe Katami has 512KB of L2 cache off die running at half the processor speed. The 800MHz should have 256KB L2 cache running at the full processor speed.

You should be able to see how much memory is recognized by the system during the memory check on boot. It is possible that you might have installed 640MB, but the system only recognizes 384MB if that's the max the m/b supports.

see thats the bizarre thing, on boot in the bios it recognizes the full 640mb of ram, however the specs say that it can only take 384mb of ram. so i guess its a good fluke, its always had more ram that 384, i cannot remember if i had 768mb of ram in it 256 x 3.....but i wanna say that yes it did. thats kinda cool i guess.

If the 384 max is only in the specs, it's possible they're simply out of date. Perhaps at the time they were written, only 128MB modules were available and with 3 DIMM slots the max would be 3X128 = 384. Or perhaps it only 'officially' supports that much, but can be run with more. You see lot's of m/b's that, for example, 'officially' support 3GB of PC2700 but only 2GB of PC3200. Obviously it can recognize the higher amount, and it might even run with 3GB of PC3200, it's just not 'officially' supported. Kinda like OC'ing, machines are often capacable of a lot more than what's 'officially' supported.