On  7 Oct 98 at 11:23, John Morgan wrote:

> We've got several Compaq Proliant 1500 servers with 1 Pentium 166
> installed in an SMP capable board.  While there are some switches
> on the board, Compaq doesn't tell you their function.  We want to
> upgrade these to non-MMX Pentium 200Mhz chips, without paying the
> "Overdrive" price. Anybody know the switch settings, or know if the
> Pentium 200Mhz is hard wired for a x3 multiplier that will override
> the switches?  I tried an Evergreen MxPro (which is WinChip based)
> and got nothing.

  Compaq have a history of making things that are technically very
good, but proprietary.  If they won't tell you what the switches do,
you may be out of luck.

  As far as I recall, the p166 and (non-MMX) p200 voltage
requirements and multiplier choices should be the same.  The p200
should run at 166 in that board without any configuration change.
There should be a pair of switches/jumpers somewhere that are
currently indicating a 2.5x multiplier, and can be changed to 3x --
UNLESS Compaq have hard-wired these signals rather than making them
configurable.  [Taking a soldering iron to your motherboard to hack
around this is not really something I'd recommend.]
  Both chips should interpret the four possible settings of these two
lines (off-off, off-on, on-off, on-on) as 1.5x, 2x, 2.5x and 3x (not
necessarily in that order).

  If you can determine that the multiplier selection is configurable,
it's possible that some of your existing p166s will run at 200 just
by changing the multiplier.  Neither Compaq nor Intel is going to
endorse such a practice, of course.

  This all seems like a lot of work for a 25% CPU boost.  Maybe
SMP offers a better upgrade path for you?
  SMP is only going to help if you are running an OS that takes
advantage of it.  NT and Linux do, Win 9x doesn't.
  AMD and Cyrix CPUs support an SMP standard that no moterboard
makers have adopted; AFAIK, all SMP motherboards you will find
support Intel's proprietary SMP feature.  I don't know about WinChip,
but I can't see SMP support being an important feature in their
target markets; I'd assume that even if they have some provision for
SMP, it's not likely to be Intel-compatible.
  Intel recommends that SMP CPUs be within one "step" revision of
each other.  SO even though a p200 will run happily enough at 166, I
wouldn't expect an SMP system using one p166 and one P200 to fly.
  You probably can't find p166s any more, but what you might be able
to do is pull the p166s from half of the machines, and install them
as second CPUs in the remainder.  Then install pairs of p200s in the
machines you took the p166s out of.

  The cost is going to be comparable:  to turn two p166 machines into
two SMP machines, you'd buy two p200s -- you just don't throw away
the p166s.  And as long as your OS can take advantage of it, the
boost should be more like 50% than 25%.
  [There is a utility -- I think it's in the Resource Kit, and maybe
on the web -- to convert an installed single-CPU NT to take advantage
of SMP; I believe it's called UpToMP.exe.]

David G

                                  -----
                PCBUILD mailing list -  http://nospin.com
         Bob Wright:[log in to unmask] - Drew Dunn:[log in to unmask]