10/11/99

1:17am

So here I am, stuck in windows… cursing at hardware. So what happened you
ask? Some sort of catastrophic happening to force me into this other “os” if
you want to call it that? No, not really. I recieved from my buddy Squiz
his old Matrox Millenium II to see if it would get rid of the ugly lines on my
moniter (it did). Since I was on the floor getting my paws into the syste, I
figured I’d play the CPU swap game.


Since you asked, I have 3.


  • Celeron 400, bought when I originally got my new system.
  • Celeron 300a (overclockable to 450 at one point), given to me by Iambe
    who recieved 2… sadly this one won’t overclock that high anymore. I
    plan to try again when I have better cooling for it.
  • PII-233 (over clocked to 350), recieved from the Dude at Dell from
    when I originally put out the call for hardware to the UFie community.


Anyway, so now my screen is clear when I’m in X or windows, no wierd lines
running off the top of the windows. I decided to see how much of an
improvement performance wise I could get from the different CPUs. I
downloaded some benchmarking software (Passmark’s if you were wondering) and got
to it. I setup a baseline system as the current CPU, the PII-350, and did the
tests.


Then I swapped to the Cel-400 CPU. No boot. Shit. Try again, reseat,
reboot. Nothing. Put in Cel-300a. Boot. Set speed to 450 (what it used to
over clock to). Boot to windows (I’d rather scandisk than fsck if I’m going
to crash). Get about halfway in and crash. Realize I’m going to need more
cooling to get it going properly, even after bumping up the voltage. Shit.
Give up on the 300a for now. Put 400 back in. Still nothing. Wonder how I
can kill a drive with it sitting in a box for 3 months. Put PII back in.
Boot up. Nothing. Power down, hold the magic “reset SoftCPU settings to
default” button. Nothing. Boot again. Boots. Set up to old settings of
350 at 100mhz bus. Reboot. Halts halfway into windows. Reboot. Bump up
voltage, reboot. Halts halfway into windows. Shit. Put Cel-400 in again.
Boot up. Get message that tells me the CPU isn’t configured. Set it to the
default (fscking multiplier locked CPUs) of 400 at 66mhz bus. Reboot. Boots
up fine. Run some programs to make sure that it’s stable. Load up benchmark
program, set the old settings as the baseline, and run the tests.



Lies, Damn Lies, and Benchmarks


Sadly, due to (I assume) the 66 mhz bus speed (I’m going to try 75 in a sec,
but I doubt that’ll work… maybe with a triple cooler fan from Future Shop
though….) most of the benchmarks were lower. The system doesn’t
seem any slower to me, but what do I know. I’ll reboot from this
horror and play some Q3 and do a bit
of gimping to see if I feel a difference,
but I gather I won’t. Sucks to see on the benchmark that in going to a higher
processer you get a performance decrease though 🙁


ooh! ooh! recovered one of my photo albums from my second
Calgary trip! Check it out here.

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Category: Technology