On 11 Nov 99, at 23:13, Dennis Thiel wrote:

> My brother in law has a Pentium 75 machine he needs to upgrade.
> It's a socket 5 motherboard. Can it support a P133 or P166?

  Socket 5 should handle a P133, although it may run it at 75 or 100
MHz.  You want to both increase the multiple from 1.5x to 2.0x, and
the FSB from 50 to 66 MHz.  While a good Socket 5 board will let you
do both, some of the cheap P75s that were around might not provide a
way to do either.
  In which case, you might look at IDT's "WinChip" line, or
Evergreen's upgrade options.

> I don't know the manufacturer but the Award BIOS screen at the
> bottom says 10-12-95 VT82C570-2A5L7F0HC-00.  I know that one of
> these numbers is the board manufacturer...can anyone tell me which
> one or where I can look it up?

  Award can tell you who the manufacturer was from that VT82...
number.  They may have a web interface now -- the last time I needed
this, you had to leave a message on their BBS.

> Also, it has 6 SIMM slots but only one 8MB SIMM installed. The
> other 5 slots are empty. I thought Pentiums had to have SIMMS
> installed in pairs. It boots up fine into Win 3.1.

  Some of the cheap P75 designs included a kludge to allow operation
with a single SIMM installed -- this might only work with a "double-
sided" SIMM:  2 MB, 8 MB or 32 MB, and not with a 4 MB, 16 MB or 64
MB size.  And probably only on one bank, too.  [Six 72-pin SIMM slots
sounds like a lot -- any chance these are two 72-pin slots and four
30-pin slots?]

  [Note that single-SIMM operation suggests that this was a custom
design for the mass/low-end P75 market, rather than a general-purpose
Socket 5 board, and so odds are a little against your finding
multiplier and FSB configuration options.]

David G

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