This might be a stupid question. I want to upgrade a P-200 MMX (Socket 7).

I have found a local distributor with a Celeron 366 Socket 370. (It's
cheap). Can I swap
them or are the two totally incompatible (physically or otherwise)?

Thanks,

Ian

On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 13:00:57 -0500, "Ian"
<ianstock"antispam"@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
>This might be a stupid question. I want to upgrade a P-200 MMX (Socket 7).
>
>I have found a local distributor with a Celeron 366 Socket 370. (It's
>cheap). Can I swap
>them or are the two totally incompatible (physically or otherwise)?

Totally incompatible I'm afraid, both physically AND otherwise
(electrically they use a totally different bus).

You MIGHT be able to upgrade your socket 7 board with a K6 processor,
they were made at speeds up to 550MHz as I recall. However it's quite
doubtful that you would be able to use the fastest K6 chips in a board
that originally housed a P200MMX. In fact, chances are you're pretty
much SOL in terms of useful CPU upgrades for that board.

-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

On Fri, 05 Nov 2004 14:22:18 -0500, Tony Hill
<(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:

>On Fri, 5 Nov 2004 13:00:57 -0500, "Ian"
><ianstock"antispam"@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>>
>>This might be a stupid question. I want to upgrade a P-200 MMX (Socket 7).
>>
>>I have found a local distributor with a Celeron 366 Socket 370. (It's
>>cheap). Can I swap
>>them or are the two totally incompatible (physically or otherwise)?
>
>Totally incompatible I'm afraid, both physically AND otherwise
>(electrically they use a totally different bus).
>
>You MIGHT be able to upgrade your socket 7 board with a K6 processor,
>they were made at speeds up to 550MHz as I recall. However it's quite
>doubtful that you would be able to use the fastest K6 chips in a board
>that originally housed a P200MMX. In fact, chances are you're pretty
>much SOL in terms of useful CPU upgrades for that board.
>
>-------------
>Tony Hill
>hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca

The top multiplier K6-X supports is 6x (set jumpers to 2x, the chip
interprets it as 6x). If the bus speed of the board tops at 66, you
are stuck with 400MHz - still better than p200mmx. With 75MHz bus
option and a bit of luck (IDE controller and PCI and AGP, if any,
cards may or may not tolerate this overclock) it comes to 450. If
there is the 83MHz bus option, and assuming the PCI/AGP devices take
it, it comes to 500 - nothing to write home about these days, but
already acceptable for basic MS Office work and web browsing under
Win2k/WinXP, assuming there is enough RAM (256MB at least). And in
case this board is of SuperSocket7 type (quite unlikely - it would
rather be already running some sort of K6-x instead of P200MMX if it
was one) and it has the bus speed 100MHz available, you may try your
luck with one of K6-2+/K6-3+ chips. These chips can go all the way to
600MHz with a bit of luck, and they have on-chip L2 cache that also
helps quite noticeably (I even used one of these for a while to run
Visual Studio .NET, and it was tolerable). The board may or may not
have the core voltage settings required by K6-x, but these chips
tolerate overvoltage quite well with adequate cooling.
Having said all that, I still suggest to replace the board with
something more contemporary. Even the cheapest Sempron will be leaps
and bounds ahead of anything socket7 is capable of. Of course this
will result in the need to replace the case and PSU (the current one
hardly is ATX, much more likely older AT type), and RAM (the old board
probably runs PC66, maybe even EDO, but surely not DDR).

The best thing to do for your board is likely an Evergreen upgrade. They're
about $89 new and will take it to 400 Mhz K6-2. At 66 Mhz they run at 400, and
I guess they work in some socket 5 boards.

It's also possible your board has the 128MB RAM limitation. Evergreen has BIOS
updates that won't cure this, but will probably allow the board to recognize
newer (and faster) harddrives. This will help your speed as much as anything
alse.

On something like that I'd still recommend older software, 98SE, Office97and
like if used AOL, version 7. Windows 2000 might run well, but I think XP isn't
the best choice, 256RAM is good idea for any machine running XP.

The other thing, I'd keep it FAT32 if using 2000 or XP. At least then if the
hardware or the OS gets FUBARed you can at least get your files back on almost
any PC.

JURB