08-04-2014, 01:53 AM
Hello everyone,
I got an old Dell Precision 420 Workstation some time ago which originally has two 1.0GHz Pentium III Slot 1 in it. I thought about making it a little faster and put two Pentium III-S 1.26GHz in it (of course they are Socket 370 but MSI has had some nice adapters for that). It starts up and I can go into BIOS (there the only "problem" seems to be that the cous are identified as "Pentium-II 1.26"), the SCSI utilitty also runs perfect but when it comes to booting from a harddrive it hangs up with an error "Alert! The current cpu is not supported by the rev of this motherboard. system halted" and you can do nothing against it.
I suggest that this error maybe comes up when there is no microcode for the installed cpus and as the chipset is an Intel 840, there was no support for the newer Pentium III Tualatins. Because of this, I have no donor BIOS for the Tualatin microcodes from Dell, maybe I can find a BIOS with the codes from another board manufacturer. Does it need to come from a phoenix BIOS? I might have a BIOS file from a Tualatin ready board which has an Award BIOS.
I really hope that someone here can help me out with that, this could be one of very few examples of running Tualatin PIIIs with Intels Dualchannel Rambus Chipset!
As I really try to achieve that goal (even if it sounds odd that I want to upgrade a 15 year old workstation with 13 year old cpus) I am willing to pay a sort of "reward" to the one that gets it to work.
I got an old Dell Precision 420 Workstation some time ago which originally has two 1.0GHz Pentium III Slot 1 in it. I thought about making it a little faster and put two Pentium III-S 1.26GHz in it (of course they are Socket 370 but MSI has had some nice adapters for that). It starts up and I can go into BIOS (there the only "problem" seems to be that the cous are identified as "Pentium-II 1.26"), the SCSI utilitty also runs perfect but when it comes to booting from a harddrive it hangs up with an error "Alert! The current cpu is not supported by the rev of this motherboard. system halted" and you can do nothing against it.
I suggest that this error maybe comes up when there is no microcode for the installed cpus and as the chipset is an Intel 840, there was no support for the newer Pentium III Tualatins. Because of this, I have no donor BIOS for the Tualatin microcodes from Dell, maybe I can find a BIOS with the codes from another board manufacturer. Does it need to come from a phoenix BIOS? I might have a BIOS file from a Tualatin ready board which has an Award BIOS.
I really hope that someone here can help me out with that, this could be one of very few examples of running Tualatin PIIIs with Intels Dualchannel Rambus Chipset!
As I really try to achieve that goal (even if it sounds odd that I want to upgrade a 15 year old workstation with 13 year old cpus) I am willing to pay a sort of "reward" to the one that gets it to work.