Motherboard Help Pages
2. I want to put a new processor
in my system. It is pentium 133. What is the maximum it will
take?
The first thing to check is your
documentation if you have any. If you don't then the next
thing to check is the motherboard itself to see what socket
and chipset it is. The white processsor socket has the number
embossed into the plastic. If it is socket 5 then you are
almost certainly at the limit of the mainboard. If it is socket
7 then look for a black chip with intel on it. If it is intel
HX or FX then then maximum will be Pentium 200 (not MMX).
If it is intel VX or TX then the maximum is 233mmx.
For other chipsets it requires
to look a bit closer at other factors. The first thing to
check is whether the board supports mmx processors or not.
The easiest clue for this is voltage settings for the processor.
The early MMX processors had voltages ranging from 2.8v for
Intel to 3.2/3.3v for AMD. If your board has jumpers (or dip
switches) to set voltages in this range then it will support
MMX Processors and the limit will be at least 233mmx. If it
doesn't then it will support non MMX Processors up to 200MHz.
Note that there is still a chance
that it may support speeds above this. Although at the time
that the 133 (or 133mmx) were in production the limits were
as above, your system may have had a motherboard replacement
or have been built much later using an old chip on a newer
motherboard.
Firstly in order to go faster
it must support MMX (motherboard with voltage settings), secondly
it needs to be a non intel chipset (VIA, ALI,SIS etc) since
intel never produced a socket 7 Processors beyond 233MHz (they
went to slot 1 pentium II for faster Processors) their chipset
did not support faster socket 7 chips. In order to check for
the maximum speed possible it is important to understand how
the speed settings are done for the chip. The speed settings
for all chips are done in 2 parts, the first is the Bus speed
(50,60,66,75,83,95,100 for socket 7) and the second is the
multiplication factor that mutiplies the bus speed up to the
full processor speed. To explain it is best to illustrate
with an example. An Intel 133mmx Processor runs at 66bus on
a multiplication of 2 (2x66=132 - the difference is due to
the fact that the bus speed is not in fact 66 exactly but
in fact 66.666.. ). An Intel 233mmx runs at 66bus on a multiplication
of 3.5 (3.5x66=231). To check for your maximum you need to
just multiply together the maximum bus speed and the maximum
multiplication factor eg 5.5x100 = 550 maximum. Assuming you
can set the correct voltage then this will be your maximum
possible. (note that there is still unfortunately no guarantee
that this will work in all cases as there are motherboards
that in theory support up to 500 but will in practice not
work successfully with an AMD k6-2-500).
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