[sdiy] sort of OT: Making the best of Pentium 3's / computers in music mailing list/forum?

[groovyshaman]

Hi Anthony.

Slot 1 P3 is either Katmai (slow) or Coppermine (less slow).  What you 
really want is a socket-370 Tualitin core, those go into the mid 
gigahertz.  Look for a slocket to fit a 370 into a slot 1, with on-card 
power conversion circuitry.  I breathed new life into an old dell xps 
T450 and replaced the slot 1 P3 450ghz with a powerleap slocket P3 
1.4Ghz celeron (tualitin core) that kicks @ss for music and apps.  I've 
got W2K and Mandrake dual boot.  Xeon P3 is slot 2 so that won't work in 
slot 1, and even if you could overcome the physical and electrical 
incompatibility there would likely be chipset issues.  You can use PC133 
in PC100 slots (beware timings).  You can overclock the 100Mhz bus to 
133 if you have a 440BX chipset and a nvidia AGP 2x video card, the 
chipset will keep PCI sane and AGP will be like 89mhz but the nvidia can 
handle it.  Sorry, no recommendation for a forum.

-George

anthony wrote:
> I have recently been given a bunch of older PC's with various versions of 
> Pentium 3's, Celerons & AMD Durons ranging from 500MHz to 900MHz. I plan to 
> use these machines for music only. I was wondering if there was a good forum 
> or a mailing list (preferably the latter) where people discuss using 
> machines of this ilk, running Win98, Win2K, Linux, etc.
> 
> Main questions I've been wondering is whether it matters if you use PC133 
> RAM on a 100MHz bus, how common and how cheap are 256MB PC133 RAM sticks (I 
> only got in, but quite a few 128MB sticks), if the faster processors are 
> Slot 1 or PGA370, whether I can fit my 933MHz Xeon (933/256/133/1.7V - from 
> a monster Compaq server) into any Slot 1 motherboard (so far I'm guessing 
> "no" with the only slot 1 Pentium III board that I have...).
> 
> I think this query is germaine to this group because there is a LOT of DIY 
> involved and synth work will be the main focus.