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I think I'll fire up my dual processor 366 MHz BP-6 for old times' sake.

not to flamebait but maybe they should call it SLASHDOT Where Old news is New news

"Finally, I would also like to say thanks to my roommates Mark and Ben, because with them they made this mod a whole lot easier. Originally this was Mark's idea, and he got some ideas from someplace online that isn't there anymore [NOTE: BP6.com did this awhile ago], so I would like to give credit to my roommate and whoever has done this before. If you have any other questions, feel free to Email me."

    News? C'mon guys... i even recall seeing a story about a HD window right here on Slashdot not that long ago!

By the way, if you're unable to put together a keyboard layout from memory, I suggest taking a couple of quick pictures of your keyboard with a digital camera - at least that way you won't be left wondering which key goes where.

Case modder - okay
CPU overclocker - okay
Grapic card overclocker - okay
HD modder - ???

Actually there are guys that mod their harddrives.

Notice the less than clean working area with metal particles from the dremeling everywhere. This is less than wise, as the probability that foreign material will get in the drive and act like sandpaper is high. I certainly wouldn't put a modded drive like this in a production machine.

I think modding is great, but this is where I draw the line.

Decent audio on SMP enabled boards is possible... provided you don't own a Creative card.

Creative has yet to release drivers that allow full functionality in SMP envrionments. Attempting to use drivers that enable EAX or surround sound results in the electronic equivalent of fingernails across a chalkboard coming out of your speakers.

Search the forums at BP6.com for "live" for plenty of commentary about the subject.

The server seems to be somewhat /.ed already, so here's a direct link to just the final image of the transparent drive.

If you want to see the other ~35 images, use the original link to the full page.

The server seems to be somewhat /.ed already, so here's a direct link to just the final image of the transparent drive.

If you want to see the other ~35 images, use the original link to the full page.

I use a abit bp6 - 5 PCI, 1AGP (Obviously) and 2 ISA. Check it out here

As part of the thread, yes, the ISA bus hangs off the PCI for keyboard, serial, parallel, etc. The USB bus hangs off PCI. Which is why intel has been working so hard to kill everything but USB. Of course, if it actually worked 1% as well as advertised, it likely would be pretty good. My experience with USB has been pretty sucky.

I am not sure how the multiple pci slots work. I think there is a limit of 2 or 3, then they start using the bridges to get the rest to work, but what sorts of diminishing returns you get, or upper limits to the # of slots, well, I could not hazard a guess. I just wish someone would come out with a agp bridge so I could run dual geforce3's with the dual monitors. Laff.

do it yourself!

FWIW, all Athlons can do SMP, but there's no boards on the market that support it, and even when this one makes it to market, it'll probably cost a mint and require a special case/PS.

I agree on the power supply, Athlons have a big draw, and duals will be worse of course. I disagree on the cost. Remember the BP6 from Abit? It was a big sucess because it took cheaper chips (Celerons) and created SMP systems at at price that was reasonable.

Here we have Athlons, offering a far better price/performance ratio than anything Intel has to offer. If Abit comes out with a board in the BP6 price range, I bet its more popular than the BP6. Remember, the BP6 has its own website few motherboards can claim that.

You can find Gentus Linux by going to the BP6 web site. However, you probably knew that, and probably knew it would not work. Try posting to the message boards on the Bp6 site, I'm sure someone will have a copy for you.

I really like the Abit motherboards. I currently run the BP6 with two celerons. I'm not sure I would go for an 'experiemental' motherboard in the future, though.

Thats what they said about the Celeron. However I have two on my system, on an Abit BP6 motherboard. According to rumour, the VP6 will supposedly be able to do the same for the Cel-2, and since its also by Abit, I believe that it just might. Plus there's a new version of the Powerleap slotket (Neo 370? I forget) which looks like it'll enable Cel-2's to be SMP'd.

Information courtesy of BP6.COM

Pax,

White Rabbit +++ Divide by Cucumber Error ++

> Incidentally, what did it take to o/c the 366 to 550?

2 Things: Cooling, and Power.

1. A heatsink. I mean a REAL heatsink: www.3dfxcool.com/alpha7ho.htm
Don't let the website name fool you, they sell cpu coolers (along with video card fans)

2. The 2nd cpu needed a little extra juice. Had to bump the voltage up to 2.10v. Also, in the BIOS, turn Error Speed Hold off (forgeting the exact name, but should be close enough), and also select Custom MHz: FrontSideBus speed: 100 Mhz.

I've been running the dual system since last Nov. I've had NT4 and NT5 crash about once every 2 months, due to a "IRQ not handled exception." Never did track this one down.

You might want to check the overclockers database to see if the week your cpu was made, can be overclocked: Overclockers Database
Main site is here:www.overclockers.com

Also, make sure you upgrade the Abit BP6 Bios.
www.bp6.com

I think my next upgrade will be dual 1 GHz P3's. I want my system to be 100% rock solid (allthough I am EXTREMELY HAPPY with the c366 @ 550 ;-)

Cheers

~~~

30 days??? WOW! 2 hours has me worn out! :-)

BTW:
All of you with BP6 motherboards make sure you flash the latest bios before even attempting to do anything with the ATA66 controller. You can get lots of good stuff including the latest BIOS at
www.bp6.com

They are _meant_ to have SMP disabled ;-)

as mentioned above, check out the Abit BP6 for a dual Celery mobo - and more info at www.bp6.com.

> *do NOT* buy a BP6 for a server

I agree.

I haven't had any problems with the bp6.
I checked www.bp6.com first to see what the issues were. I know there have been a few bad boards (my cousin went thru 2 of them!)

I needed a cheap SMP system for compiling at home, and it fit the bill perfectly.

But there's more than higher clock speeds to these puppies. For one thing, they include the SSE instructions which, while they may or may not help you personally, definitely can't hurt to have. More importantly, they will be fabbed at 0.18 micron and include 256k of L2 cache. Now before anybody gets too excited, they plan to cripple them down to the standard 128k cache size. But if the BP6 showed us anything, it's that disabling can beundone... could be some exciting times ahead for overclockers...

Here's a HardwareCentral review of the Celeron 2 (today must be the day NDAs were lifted; look for other butt-kicking sites like Thresh's and Sharky's to maybe have something on it later today.

Here's BP6.com, an excellent reference for those of you with that funky Abit board. Check out the video preview of the Powerleap FC-PGA adapters - basically they plug into Coppermines and allow two of them (new stepping ONLY) to run in SMP mode. Of course, your BP6 would be running at 100MHz FSB by default - and overclocking well past 100MHz (which is what is required to unlock the true potential of Coppermines) is flaky on any BX board.

Coppermines seem, for me, an excellent buy. I have a 500E running at 733Mhz (147MHz FSB) on an MSI MS-6309 Apollo Pro 133A board. Excellent performance, and super stable.

The 66MHz FSB for these new Celerons is a double-edged sword. It's good that the 66MHz+ gap is open, which is really what made the original Celerons such good overclockers; but besides the performance hit (naturally), the lower FSB means a higher multiplier. The internal multiplier (locked by Intel) for the 600MHZ Celeron 2 is 9.0x. That's ass-high, people. I don't think many motherboards currently support that. At the very least I think a BIOS upgrade is in order, unless you're absoluely sure the board can handle that high a multiplier - but getting back to the performance hit, not only is your memory, etc. running at only 66MHz, but with the high multiplier your chip is running 9 times faster than your system. That's a low of waiting on its part.

My advice? Get a 500E or 550E (both can be had for around $200, if you know where to look) and overclock them beyond insanity. 150MHz FSB is not out of the question for these chips, especially the ones with the new core stepping. I'll be going for a 600E (FC-PGA) as soon as school lets out for me for the Summer.

For a truly bent journalistic look at the Coppermines, check out this piece I wrote for the fantastic Overclockers.com over Winter Break.

www.bp6.com reports that single-CPU's works okay on the BP6 with the Powerleap 370 to FCPGA adaptor, but not SMP. Although I wouldnt be surprised to see the adaptor tweaked for SMP real soon now

My understanding (from reading bp6.com) is that the SYS temperature on this motherboard tends to be higher than the CPU temps because they placed the temperature monitor right around the voltage regulators. Because these things generate heat, the SYS temperature doesn't reflect the temperature of the motherboard in general.

For what it is worth, I have experienced exactly zero lockups so far on my system that were not obviously driver related.

Note that I am running two different speed celerons in my system. Using Linux 2.2.14, you need to disable the TSC skew correction in the kernel. If by chance you are in this situation, email me and I'll send you the patch I use.

I have a bp6 with two 366 clocked to 550, and had lots of lockup problems, It seemed that the second pci slot (down from the AGP) was alomost unuasble. If I put one of my network cards in there I would get 19000 mil second access times move to another slot and I would get 10 mil sec. also my adaptec 2940 would get alot of scsi errors in this same slot. after putting one card in at a time and testing.. I have everything working great under linux. AGP- Viper V770 pci 1- adaptec 2940uw pci 2-Hauppauge wintv card ( this was the problem slot) pci 3-Intel etherexpress pro 10/100 pci 4-Intel etherexpress pro 10/100 pci/isa shared 5-awe 64 sound card isa 6-usr v90 modem and the temp of the processors is around 113 F It really helped to use thermal paste on the heat sinks!! Check out www.bp6.com there message board really helps

yup, I'ev had no probs getting my bp6 (two 400's)to work with Linux/FreeBSD or NT...but I have been suffering from random lockups, in windows sure, I can buy that, but not it FreeBSD or Linux. I haven't seen any pattern to them, just random :( I've tried lots of hw configurations on it and still probably twice a week it will lockup hard. anyone else seen this? fixed it? oh yeah for more info on the bp6 check this out.

I also have the BP6. I'm using two 400A (Mendocino) CPUs. They're not overclocked at the moment because of cooling issues - they run at 55 degress C cracking RC5. However, I was able to overclock them to 572 running stable, if way too hot.

The ATA/66 support works great under Linux. You need to get the HPT366 patch (available from here or any other kernel.org mirror). The README says it won't boot from the ATA/66 bus, but it works fine for me.

The Win9x and NT support is fine, but get the newest drivers from here. After applying the newest BIOS flash I was unable to install Win2k, but with the earlier BIOS it worked fine.

Also, the BP6 website has some useful information.

I also have the BP6. I'm using two 400A (Mendocino) CPUs. They're not overclocked at the moment because of cooling issues - they run at 55 degress C cracking RC5. However, I was able to overclock them to 572 running stable, if way too hot.

The ATA/66 support works great under Linux. You need to get the HPT366 patch (available from here or any other kernel.org mirror). The README says it won't boot from the ATA/66 bus, but it works fine for me.

The Win9x and NT support is fine, but get the newest drivers from here. After applying the newest BIOS flash I was unable to install Win2k, but with the earlier BIOS it worked fine.

Also, the BP6 website has some useful information.

Some things to look at: 1) Make sure your BIOS is configured for MPS 1.1 as opposed to MPS 1.4; the latter has been reported to nuke USB support. 2) There have also been reports of the HPT UDMA66 controllers causing problems -- there's a version of the BP6 BIOS that has no HPT support (download from BP6.com).

FWIW, the BIOS "implementation" is similar to motherboard SCSI. There's that entry that says "boot from A/C/SCSI" except now it's the extra IDEs. Then, when you boot, after the normal drive detection , there is the extra drive just like the "Hit Ctrl-A" SCSI boot.

see the motherboard at http://www.bp6.com/