do old LX boards support fast Celerons?

[CyberSpaceCowboy]

Will older 440LX boards support faster Celerons (600-700mhz) with internal clock multipliers greater than settings originally available by setting jumpers on the board? I told a friend I thought that since later Pentium II class CPU's ignored the mobo's multiplier, he should be able to use any Celeron (with a slocket adapter) with his board's 66Mhz FSB, was I correct? The board in question is a Gigabyte GA-686LX, an old cheapie board, probably with a max multipier of 5.

I also told him that, taking cost into account, a fast Celeron, combined with an inexpensive 3D card (GeForce 1, DDR), would be a viable alternative to upgrading to a Pentium III/Coppermine, plus mobo and memory. Opinions? Is lack of AGP 2x/4x support a huge disadvantage?

[800XL]

The multiplier problem can be completely ignored, but two other factors come in:

Bios support (can the bios run with a chip it might not correctly recognize?)

Voltage Support (Can the board provide a voltage even close to what the new Celeron requires?)

As for the AGP 2x/4x, I believe the LX chipset is an AGP 2x solution, though I could be wrong. Either way, I've never seen a benchmark that could really show a huge difference between the different AGP speeds. If you get to the point of using AGP texturing (card ran out of frame buffer memory) even AGP4x is not enough to make it really bearable.

[krusty the klown]

The first thing to do is visit the mobo manufacturer's website and find out if there's an updated CPU compatability list.

You may well get round the multiplier problem, as the multiplier is fixed into the chip. I'm running a cel600 (9*) on a mobo that only has up to 8.5* multiplier and it's fine.

I'm assuming that the mobo is slot1 - you'll need a socket to slot convertor. The Abit slotket!!! is good. This has a manual jumper setting for the CPU core voltage - the new celerons run at 1.5V default, so you'll have to find out whether the slotket/mobo can sort this out between them!

You may also need a BIOS upd8, but the mobo manufacturer's website should tell you this.

Remember that the new celerons are different to the old ones and old slockets probably won't work...

[krusty the klown]

hehehe, ya just got in before me there, 800XL!!!!

[ErikMykland]

I got the same mobo and I tried to run an old Celeron 500 on it.
Gigabyte offers a Bios update for Celeron support on their Homepage, but I don't think the 686-LX supports coppermines.
My problem was that I could not update the Bios. Awdflash told something about a wrong filesize when I tried to flash it, although the old and the new Bios were exactly of the same size. Curious, isn't it.
Try to upgrade your Bios first. If that works you might have a chance to run the CeleMine.
Good Luck