How To Run A Fast Coppermine In FC-PGA Without A FC-PGA Motherboard?
This changed rapidly when I recently received a powerful high-speed (800 MHz, unlocked!) Coppermine processor in the sweet little FC-PGA format. Suddenly I realized that I had no decent platform to run it in. So far you could only get FC-PGA motherboards with the 'value' chipset i810e, the one with the built-in 3D-deccelerator. This is changing right now, but I needed to run this new processor instantly and I did not want to believe that I couldn't. The first thing that came to my mind was the bunch of Socket370/Slot1-adapter cards that were still lying in my CPU-drawer and so I thought I'd give them a shot. I took one of my Asus 'S370' adapter cards, plugged the Coppermine in it and tried my luck in a Asus P3C-L i820-motherboard, anticipating nothing but defeat, because I was aware of the changes that were made to Coppermine's pin-out. It came as it had to, the system remained absolutely silent.
Intel's Data Sheets And Frank Voelkel's Article
OK, I thought. So we've got to do something about it. I won't give up that fast! Therefore I went to one of my favorite locations on the web, Intel's developer website . It took only a few seconds and I could take a good look at the datasheet of the FC-PGA Coppermine processor. At the same time I remembered an article at the German ZDNET that I had heard about recently. Frank Voelkel, currently still editor for PC Professionell, the German PC Magazine, had given a description of how to run FC-PGA Coppermine processors in old Socket370 Celeron-motherboards. The article, called 'Der Sockeltrick ' = 'The Socket Trick', had stirred up quite a bit of commotion in the hardcore overclocker scene recently and people had done their best to translate Frank's words into English. Luckily my German is pretty good, so I read the article and compared the stuff with the datasheet. Five minutes later my soldering iron was heating up and I was getting ready for some minor surgery (better minor surgery than no surgery!) on the Slot1-adapter card and some microsurgery on my FC-PGA Coppermine as well.
Before people are annoying me with ridiculous emails I would like to point out that I do NOT claim that I was the first to find out about the issue I am describing here. I am aware of Frank's article and Frank's aware of mine. I am not aware of any people that tried to translate and copy this article into English or other languages, but I am sure that there are many of them. I will obviously only give credits to the initiator of this issue, and that is Frank Voelkel, who by the way will join Tom's Hardware Guide on April 1, 2000. Thanks Frank, we can't wait to welcome you in our team!
