Dual PIII & PCI slots 3.3V power & fans speed mods

[grizlyk]

Hello.

Some time ago I got a BP6 mobo as alive and cheap example of hardware dual processor motherboard.

The mobo was equipped with dual 'mendocino' core celerons 333 SL36B. The celeron is reduced PII CPU in fact (MMX only) and with 100MHz bus overclocking, the dual SL36B 500 MHz CPUs are quite slow, there is no SSE and the total power consumption is quite high (especially for my 25A/5V power supply).

The 5V power problem is significant because of BP6 mobo design, the mobo uses 5V power channel to feed most parts of the mobo with 3.3V and less, but modern ATX V2 power supplies suggest 12V channel for the purposes. It is a problem to find 5V powered ATX power unit now. By the way, the additional power chips placed on the BP6 mobo dramatically reduce power noise for PCI and ISA buses, the working of mobo does not affect to all 'noisy' PCI/ISA adapters, that does not care about own power (so have no own power chips etc).

One rainy day i decided to upgrade the mobo. The reasons of the mods are:
- install single 'coppermine' core FC-PGA PIII CPU
- install dual 'coppermine' core FC-PGA PIII CPUs (if it is possible)
- install modern PCI cards (3.3V PCI power pins required)
- reduce power consumption to use all CPU&case 12V fans with 5V/7V power to avoid air flow noise

Well, the mod step by step...

The story is enough big to place it into forum, if the placement is not required read more by link http://grizlyk1.narod.ru/other/abit2p3.htm .

Best regards.

[Derek]

An excellent article! Thank you for sharing your hard work with us

[grizlyk]

hard work

at any time

[InactiveX]

Great research. Thank you!

[g0fvt]

Good to see some activity, my BP6s are still in storage...

[Derek]

My, one and only, BP6 is still active.