Grant wrote:
I'm going to try a Tualatin P3-1.26 in my i810E motherboard. I did a ton of research and I think my motherboard will support it. It comes down to whether or not it's a revision B board. lspci -v just says (rev 3). eBay has it for $31 shipped and guaranteed not DOA. My main concern is the memory. My motherboad supports PC100 memory as well as a 133fsb although it's not running at that speed now. I'll have to crank it up to 133fsb to support the Tualatin CPU, and I wonder how that will affect the PC-100 memory. Would it be better to buy good Kingston PC-100 memory and hope it can handle the extra speed, or to buy PC-133 memory for the motherboard that officially supports PC-100.
One thing that comes to mind is that the Tualatin P3-1.26 is a server cpu and does not work in many desktop boards (I have *heard* that it requires motherboard/memory ECC). If you've done the checking, and the board is suitable then cool.
Assuming that is the case :-), I would hunt PC133 memory on ebay - there is a lot of it, and provided the Dell does not require rare or odd DIMM layouts, it should be cheap. Again - check if you need to buy ECC memory due to the choice of cpu (that will make it more expensive!).
With respect to the question "yeah - but is it worth upgrading?" - I think there is plenty of life left in PIII machinery - I run one of these:
http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/P3/VIA/P3TDDE.cfm and it is just great! Cheers Mark -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
