On Sun, 21 Dec 2003 18:00:58 GMT, "Jean Castonguay"
<jcastong@riq.qc.ca> wrote:I have an old motherboard equipped with an Intel 430HX chipset.According to the User's Manual, it accepts Pentium processors up tp200 MHz.I want to find a used 200 MHzprocessor with the lowest powerconsumption. What Pentium should I look for? What are the markingsthat allow to recognize it?
Sandpile.org lists the power consumption of a nearly all recent x86
processors. Here's what they have for some socket 7 chips that will
work in your board, all at 200MHz:
Rise mP6 (very rare) : 8.5W
IDT Winchip : 8.9W (3.3V) / 10.4W (3.52V)
IDT Winchip2/2A : 8.8W (3.3V) / 12.0W (3.52V)
Intel Pentium (classic): 15.5W
Intel Pentium MMX : 15.7W
AMD K6 : 20.0W (0.30um, common) / 12.45 (0.25um, rare)
Cyrix/IBM 6x86MX : 22.3W (Cyrix) / 20.5W (IBM)
As you can see, there are quite a range of power consumption here, and
also quite a range in performance. The Cyrix chip is the fastest of
the bunch, clock for clock, but also the highest power consuming chip.
The Rise chips have the lowest power consumption and also decent
performance, but are damn near impossible to find.
Your best bets are probably either to look for an IDT Winchip2(A),
which are rare but possible to find with a bit of searching, or an
Intel Pentium MMX. The Pentium and Pentium MMX had about the same
maximum power consumption, but the PMMX was a fair bit faster.
Note that it's quite possible that some or most of these chips will
NOT work on your motherboard. In particular, it's almost certain that
the 0.25um AMD K6 chips will not work, even if you can find one of
them (they are almost as rare as the Rise mP6). Even the PentiumMMX
might not work, as it requires a split plain voltage (2.8V for the
processor core, 3.3V for I/O). Most of the earlier Pentium
motherboards did not provide support for this, which would rule out
most of the above chips.
The upside to this is that the IDT Winchip processors work in damn
near every socket 7 board ever built (and even a bunch of socket 5
boards). While these were never the fastest chips produced, they made
for rather nifty upgrades for older systems. In fact, the Winchip2A
233MHz processor will almost certainly work in this system as well, so
long as you get the 66MHz bus speed version.
-------------
Tony Hill
hilla <underscore> 20 <at> yahoo <dot> ca