Playing with a PIII in a PII 440LX Motherboard

Hi,

I've got an old IBM Aptiva 2138, PII 266 SECC, 440LX based chipset system which I have been 'upgrading' a bit with some 'surplus' hardware lying around... a bigger disk, memory,... up to the point where I could install XP.

And now I got into the processor. I have lying around a PIII 800/133 and thought I could try it in this mobo... even if it runs at half the speed (because FSB will be 66 instead of 133), it will run at 400 Mhz, which is a bit better than the 266Mhz.. So I went and tested it. To my suprise, it DID start up, so the mobo does supply the correct voltage... It runs DOS ok, but when trying to load XP, it just hangs when the graphic screen is supposed to load up... anybody knows what could it be ?

I know this old systems do not even deserve too much time... but take into account that I do this as a hobby,... and if I could just speed this up a bit, it could become a useful system for light work.

I'd be very carefull with that CPU. It's a coppermine core and the old mainboard/BIOS is surely supllying it with with too much Vcore. If I'm correct the old PII 233-266-300-333 used 2.0Vcore and that coppermine prolly uses 1.7Vcore. The LX chipset won't support SSE, and there will be a few other tidbits as well...

My old Dell XPS-R 400 (100 MHz FSB) is still running 24/7 (SE440BX).
Contrary to Dell's reports that it supports a max of 384 MB it actually supports 768 MB of Memory. Fastest natively supported CPU was PIII 450 MHz. I am running a 1400 MHz Celeron in there with 768 MB of PC133 and a ti4200 graphics card.
It it does fine on XP. I went the easy way and bought an adapter with 1400 MHz Celeron already set up from Powerleap.com. They still have it available for $99. Its not the same as doing it yourself, but will get the computer back to a resonable state for web surfing and other light work.

The only reason that Celeron works is cuz you have a 100Mhz chipset (iBX is a great chipset btw) and that Powerleap adapter is working around things with it's own power regulators and all. But still a very nice upgrade for such a system, that's a 256kB L2 Tualatin Celly right?!

Hi,

Yes, I had considered the potential problems with voltage, but the way it works (as I understand it) is that the processor *requests* a given voltage level from the VRM through its VID pins, and most VRMs just don't give any voltage at all if the level is not available. This is why I am quite sure that, given it boots up, it is receiving the requested voltages (1.7v).

However, I now think that my troubles are related to SSE and P3 lack of support at the BIOS level... for such an old board (440LX based) There are even some appends in google regarding such kind of problems when attempting to boot XP in systems upgraded to P3 level, even with slotkets. The fact is, the P3 processor runs OK as long as running DOS, win95 or win98... go figure.

Yes the old BIOS has probably no microcode-update for PIII's...

Thats right -- 256K L2... I can't imagine why they ever made any of the 128s

Yes the old BIOS has probably no microcode-update for PIII's...

Click to expand...

Well, I could fix that one, thanks to the microcode update package from Intel, which can inject the proper microcode into conforming old BIOS as this one.... it's the fact that the BIOS is probably not enabling SSE (which did not exist at the time) what I think is the problem...