"Hans Huber" wrote in message
...
Adding some more RAM will definitely help you out. I recommend 256MB
minimum
these days.

As far as upgrading the processor goes ... I really don't know. It's
possible you might be able to use a slotket adapter to socket 370 and
stick
a faster PIII on there. I say this because the reason the board won't go
over 500MHz is because of it's multiplier. The slotket adapters have
their
own multiplier jumper on them.

But there is one catch to this ... your FSB speed. If the board can't do
133MHz on the FSB then you're pretty much out of luck. The fastest
100FSB
(Katmai core) PIII made was 600Mhz.


That's true I think. So I was hoping to use a Coppermine core (which as
you
already know needs lower voltage). See below for my further thoughts!


Oh, and voltage plays a role as well. The Coppermine core requires 1.65V
...

The more I think about this the more I'm pretty sure you're hosed for a
new
processor, unless you just want to replace the board as well ... in
which
case you can run a PIII as fast as you want for not too much dough.
(though
more than upgrading the processor alone)

If I'm completely wrong on this somebody please speak up. I've been an
AMD
man for 7 or 8 years and despite owning one PIII 800 system (I bought
from
Office Depot) I know very little about them.


Drumguy

P.S. - The slotket became very popular with overclockers who would use
them
to put Celerons on PII and PIII boards and run them at either 100MHz
(for
a
66 bus celly) or 133 (for a 100 bus celly) ... doing this instead of
just
cranking up the multiplier resulted in huge overclocking numbers without
adding any instability (so long as it was running at a *normal* speed
....
i.e. 100,133, as opposed to 105,118,145. I'm not sure if these were
really
possible FSB speeds, but just as an example of *non-standard* bus
speeds)


Well that's probably where my problem lies. I need 100MHz FSB and I
believe
the mobo puts out 2V core voltage and the multiplier is 5 for the Pentium
III 500MHz. If I try to install a Coppermine Pentium III with 950MHz
(which
is still 100MHz FSB) it needs only 1.7V I believe (and the mobo manual
says
nothing about changing voltage!), the L2 cache dropped to 256 from 512
from
the Katmai to the Coppermine (I don't know what the implication of that
is)
and the multiplier goes to 9.5 on the Coppermine (no idea what that means
for me exactly). So I still havethe same FSB but all the other values
changed.

I just guess that the voltage will be my main problem, L2 probably too,
multiplier not sure.

But thanks for your help so far! Very much appreciated indeed!

Hans


Definetely more memory to improve performance. Wouldn't recommend 500 over
450 because too little a gain.

I thought the PII-450 was the overclocker's dream cpu at the time. Try
www.overclockers.com and http://www.ocinside.de/index_e.html for help and
results from overclocking with the multipliers. I saw one result with
900mhz with a different board http://www.cpudatabase.com/CPUdb/.

Otherwise I'd look for a Cel/P3/AMD - mb combo upgrade that fits your case
and psu to take your friend to the next upgrade. About power requirements
PII/PIII use about 1.75v from the +12v which can run with a 230w AT psu but
I'm not sure about the AMDs.