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In mid November 1999, my trusty P200 machine decided it had had enough, and gave up working. This meant that I needed a new machine.

I had already more or less decided that I was going to go for a dual-celeron system. The cost was not that much more than a single-celeron system, and cheaper than a P-II or P-III system. Currently the only motherboard that supports dual-celerons without modification is the ABit BP6, it also supports 8 IDE devices (4 UDMA33 and 4 UDMA66). At the time, the BP6 cost approx. £85 +VAT.

Celerons are generally very overclockable processors, however as they are multiplier-locked, you can only overclock by increasing the FSB from the default 66MHz. Most 300A's will run at 450 (4.5x100), and many 366A's will run at 550(5.5x100). However the overclockability of a Celeron processor is not guaranteed, and 366A's are in short supply (300A's have long been unavailable). Therefore I decided to go for two 433A's which, at the time, gave the best price/performance ratio at £49 +VAT each.

To hold the new motherboard I decided on a Vasco T-217 tower case, which provides 3 external 5.25 bays, 3 external 3.5 bays and 2 internal 3.5 bays. The cost was approx £75 +VAT.

A few other (less interesting) components were also purchased to compliment those I already had available.

further modifications

After building the system, I found that the temperature was a little on the high side, running at around 50C. The Vasco case, whilst having plenty of room inside, suffers from poor cooling by default, with the only airflow coming from the PSU which draws air up though the case and exhausts it out of the back. I added an 8cm case fan drawing cool air in at the bottom of the front of the case, the stock heatsinks on the Celerons were replaced with GlobalWin FEP32's and thermal compound, and a slot exhaust fan was added below the processors to exhaust hot air out of the back of the case. The heatsink covering the BX chipset also had thermal compond added. The front of the Vasco case was modified, removing excess material from in front of the case fan, to improve airflow into the system.

After these modifications, and with the system overclocked to 488MHZ (6.5x75, 2.0v), it ran at around 35-38C depending on the ambient temperature of the room.

The ability to overclock the machine is hampered by the relatively high clock-multiplier of the 433A processor, and the Western Digital HD being intolerant of higher bus speeds. At 540MHz (83x6.5) one of the partitions on the disk was irrepairably corrupted, requiring a reformat/reinstall of the files.

Update, 30/12/1999: Santa helped me replace the Western Digital disk with a Fujitsu, this doesn't have the same problems with higher bus speeds. The system is now occasionally clocked at 520MHz (80x6.5, 1.9v) and runs at 36-40C.

current configuration

Currently the systems compromises the following components.

what I would do differently next time

Given another chance (and slightly more money), I would get a Supermicro 750A case, which is slightly larger than the Vasco and contains more options for cooling, however it costs roughly twice as much as the Vasco.

The case, motherboard, processors, CD-ROM, soundcard and case fan were supplied by Dabs. The FEP32's, thermal compound and slot exhaust fan were supplied by overclockers.co.uk

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