To: Paul Engel who wrote (38263 ) 10/6/1998 2:28:00 AM From: Adrian Wu Read Replies (4) | Respond to
To all: Regarding the shortage of low end PII. I had the most incredible experience. I was asked to build a computer for my sister in law and I went to one of the local screwdriver shops to pick up some components including an MVP3 MB and a K6-2 333. I was tempted to "upgrade" my PII-266 machine to an overclocked Celeron A, but I have heard from many sources that the supply of Celeron 300A locally overclocks poorly. The shop owner told me that he has several Pentium II-450s that have been remarked as 300s. Yes, they were marked DOWN by Intel when there was a big shortage of 300s, but a pile of 450s were sitting in the warehouse in Malaysia. I didn't believe him but he promised to give my money back if that wasn't the case. So I bought the boxed product for US$210. I don't know whether pin B19 was shorted out to prevent the usage of the 100MHz setting, since I have an Asus P2B-LS board which allows for manual ext frequencing selection. In any case, the damn thing was multiplier-locked, which the old 0.35 micron PII-300s weren't. I set the bus speed to 100, and the multiplier to 3x, but the thing POSTed as 450! The BIOS also needed to be updated since it didn't recognize the chip, proving that the chip is new since my BIOs is dated 4/98. I ran Winbench98 without problems, and has been running the machine continously for 3 days without any problems. I used the original fan heatsink that came with it, and didn't even bother to change it to my Peltier unit. Conclusion: Intel must have been desperate to sell a $650 product for $210. BTW the version # is 716768-001. It's made in Malaysia. Try it if any of you can find one.
