Alexraptor wrote on 2025-02-06, 18:33:
I have an old Compaq Deskpro that i got from my dad, which i recently fitted out with a pair of Voodoo2, and I feel like it needs a little more juice in the CPU department. The system has a proprietary 440BX chipset motherboard, with a 450Mhz Pentium III Katmai, with a 100mhz FSB.
What are my options? Can I just upgrade to any Slot 1 coppermine P3 with matching FSB?
Probably not.
Katmai's will probably work, these went up to 600MHz.
Not all Katmai's may work right away, depending on the BIOS or it may work but won't display CPU settings correctly. Even if the board will post witha higher clocked Katmai, there's always the chance your board won't properly support it in the long run.
Coppermine compatibility may be a bit of a crapshoot and can go various ways, depending on how far you're willing to go in the modding department.
As been mentioned before, you're gonna need more info first especially the motherboard model number and revision (revisions usually matter a lot when it comes to slot 1 as tech moved so quickly in the Slot-1 era).
EDIT: I almost forgot to mention, the rest of the hardware may or may not work with the faster CPU you may be wanting. Think Slot-1 CPU cooler and the big OEM cases of the time weren't exactly refrigerator class cooling devices, but I reckon you probably already know (some of) the basics regarding this.
Having said this, it should be relatively safe to try (within reason of course, I probably wouldn't want to try something like a 1GHz Coppermine in an LX board right away or something).
I can't remember ever having experienced catastrophic hardware failure because I tried a Coppermine in a board that didn't properly support it.
Iirc usually the system would simply not POST.
(also, dang almost replied instead of edited, woops)