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Celeron Dual Board Adapter
Stephan writes "MSI recently introduced an adapter for
using two normal Celerons in dual PII boards without any tricks.
You can even increase fsb speed!"
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And so does Soltek. Dual-capable Slotkets has been around for a while. What is new about these new batches of slotkets (MSI 6905D, Soltek SL-02A8 and Powerleap) are that they allow changing the FSB (which you can probably set on the motherboard) and the core voltage (which you generally can't).
Tom Pabst, of Tom's Hardware fame, recently took a Kryotech K6-3 500 system and utilizted the cooling system to overclock an Intel processor to 618Mhz. The 618Mhz Celeron cooked the P3-500 and all other processors in it's way. He entitled his article "The World's Fastest PC."
If I had cash, I would make a Dual Celeron system o/c'd to 618Mhz a piece, 256meg of RAM, all running on a Tyan Thunderbolt motherboard. Got my SCSI and ethernet built right in. Pop in a Diamond MX300. I'd wait for Metabyte to license there new technology to Diamond. Using PGP, I'd have 4 Viper 770s running in parallel. Can you the best gaming rig in existence?
Anybody know of any UK suppliers?
John_Chalisque
I was just about to buy a dual processor PII-400 system because I didn't want to make the modifications to two Celeron processors to make them run SMP. I hadn't heard about this before! I'll have to pick up a couple of nice (and cheap) PPGA socket 370 400 MHz chips for next to nothing and run them instead! Anyone heard anything good (or bad) about running these in a Tyan Tiger 100 board?
--
Life if possible, art at any cost.
I found a price of $19 for this part at: http://www.spartantech.com/. I have bought stuff from them before, but I am in no way affiliated, blah, blah, blah...
This looks like a really nice way to go. I tried the drill/solder trick, and finally got it going, but it was really flaky, and kept crashing my box. Which was bad. It's really hard to solder the wires onto the fingers on the edge of the card, and then cram it into the slot without disconnecting and/or shorting the wire. I gave up for a while, then tried some resoldering, and fried one of the celerons. :-( Oh well, I knew what I was getting into, it was only about $60.
:-)
This looks fool-proof, and the PPGA celerons are cheaper these days anyway. Guess I'll have to go blow another $160 or so.
http://kikumaru.w-w.ne.jp/pc/celeron/index_e.html
I recently put together a new machine to use as my Linux development box at home. Here are the components I got:
:)
:)
Asus P2B-D (BIOS rev. 1008)
Celeron 300A (SL36A) (x2)
MSI MS-6905 1.0 Slotket (x2)
(modified by ComputerNerd for SMP and 2.2v)
PC Power & Cooling CPU Cool Z1-C CPU Cooler (x2)
(These are the perfect size for mounting on the
slotket, and are 1" high, which leaves just
enough space between the CPUs on the Asus
board.)
IBM DTTA-101440 14gig Ultra/ATA HDD
Asus 50x CD-ROM
Matrox Millenium G200 8MB SGRAM
Intel EtherExpress 10/100+
384MB CAS-2 PC100 Micron SDRAM (128x3)
PC Power & Cooling Personal Tower Case
PC Power & Cooling TurboCool 300 ATX Power Supply
Happy Hacker Keyboard
We put it all together, turned it on (at 66mhz
FSB, 300mhz CPUs) and installed Debian GNU/Linux.
Shut it down, jumpered the motherboard to 100mhz
FSB, 450mhz CPUs, turned it back on and it has
(knock on wood) ran flawlessly for the last week
or two (with lots of compiling, Quake 3 Arena,
and so on, so it's definitely been getting beat
on.)
Overall, I paid about $1500-1600 for the system
(sans monitor), and can say I am _extremely_
happy with its performance. 900mhz of SMP love,
running Linux no less.
(I can serve web pages AND play Quake 3 Arena at
the same time, without losing a frame! Imagine
that!)
Xar
The 300A is, by far, the most overclockable
Celeron in existance. Their production has,
however, been discontinued, as I understand it.
If you can still get your hands on 300As for a
reasonable price, you can't go wrong.
I have read many reports of people trying to OC
the 333, and while some have had success, it's
always been at unorthodox FSB speeds (like 83mhz),
which can cause disk corruption and so forth.
Running at a "supported" FSB, 66mhz or 100mhz,
is recommended, and the 300A does this quite
well.
Based on what I've read here, the K7 will have extremely good SMP support, assuming that there are chipsets for it. 16 processors was the limit that I heard stated, IIRC.
OTOH, the K7 was supposed to be fairly expensive, and its actual performance gains over a PIII remain murky. We'll see what happens when it ships.
Based other messages I've read here, I doubt that would work. The Celeron is essentially a PII, and that can only support dual processors due to a deliberate limitation imposed by Intel. For quad processors or better, you'd need Xeons.
These have been around for a while. A good place for information on this kind of stuff is www.computernerd.com
- Jon
I've been running dual ppga celeron 300a's overclocked to 450 for a couple of months now, and it works just great. Oldmanrant:But back in my day we had to solder to pins on the adapter to be able to dual them, and then cut 3 traces on the pcb with an exacto knife to increase the voltage from 2.0 to 2.2 volts (they wouldn't run stably at 450 at 2.0 volts). You youngins have it so easy.
Seriously, the best part about the card is probably the ability to change the voltage, so newer celerons can easily be overclocked too.
--------------------------------------
He said, "You'll be able to tell your grandchildren that you helped assemble the first NT supercomputer," and I cringed.
Those have been available since the beginning of April...Powerleap has one too (http://www.powerleap.com) that allows manipulation of core voltage, and has built in protection for overheating.
yours is cool and stable maxed at 2.2V - no problemo and you know it.
I'm more concerned with people who may want to give this a try for the first time without knowing some rough boundaries.
What scared me initially was that the link showed that a person could up the voltage to 2.6V! They had a warning that they don't guarantee that components would work properly
when manually set, but they didn't mention that higher voltages could damage the CPU.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
Actually, I have a lot of respect for the 6x86 series from cyrix. The problem with the thing is that cyrix insists on that silly PR rating because they cant get the clock rates up (I don't think fabbing them with 486 type technology helps much, but the alpha is fabbed with 486 tech too... he he he) When you compare the cyrix clock to clock with the offerings from intel and AMD the cyrix looks pretty good. Admittedly the math isn't up to intel spec's (which is almost always an unfair comparison because of pentium math pipeline optimizations) but it pretty much matches the AMD at same clocks again. If cyrix could get these things up to 500mhz tomorrow then you would see cyrix giving intel a run for their money again (lest you forget the reason the celery is around in the first place, it was because cyrix was selling a 133mhz cpu at intel's 133mhz price point but calling it a 166 because it got a little better than pentium 166 performance in the benchmark of the day (which was winbench)). Of course cyrix would probably insist on calling it a PR600 which would piss a bunch of quake heads off because they bought a cheap CPU only to discover it didn't do as well in their favorite game as the similarly priced Intel. On the other hand the tiny minority of people who use win '95 for development, surfing the web, or writing papers for school (and later turn it into a linux box) but don't play quake would think it a great cpu because they paid for a 133mhz cpu that gets a lot more performance than anyone else's 133mhz cpu.
BTW has anyone noticed that a PIII-450 on pricewatch is cheaper than a PII-450 or a K6III-450?