If you want the short story, look at the pictures.
[img=http://img219.imageshack.us/img219/1326/266v2fs5.th.jpg]
The long story:
On the 20th I got an i8200 from my Uncle Bob with a dead HD*. I pulled the HD out of my i8000, put it in, and had a fully functional i8200 in very good condition.
Since it was old and I have a better computer, I decided to mess with it. That means trying to overclock by any means necessary.
I knew a BSEL mod wouldn't work because the i8200 never shipped with a 533fsb, and would ignore any pinmods. I read online that the i8200 PLL/clock generator was a Cypress-W320, and wasn't programmable. I tried using SANDRA to confirm this but it couldn't detect the PLL. I looked it up at digikey.com and found that if I soldered two frequency select pins together that it would output a 133mhz fsb signal, instead of 100. I also read from somewhere else that it was on the back of the motherboard.
So I took the whole laptop apart. The motherboard was a huge pain and was stuck in the casing in the back-left corner. I swore some and in the end got it out very forcibly with a screwdriver. Next I was pissed off flipping the motherboard over and over looking for the PLL. It was hidden under the CD-ROM drive and I didn't even have to take out the graphics card. It wasn't a Cypress-W320, it was actually an ICS 9250805. I looked that up and it wasn't programmable, but had the same exact pinmod as the Cypress one.
Then a miracle happened; I did the best soldering job of my entire life. I can't describe how tiny and close together the pins are besides saying that they're really friggen tiny and really friggen close. I wanted to find out ASAP if it worked at all, especially since if I did the soldering with the chip backwards I would have soldered a VCC and ground, leaving no reason to take the time reassembling the computer.
With everything missing except the CPU cooler and the graphics card with the monitor plugged in but not screwed I hit the power button. I said &#%@ when it blanked-screened and powered off. Then I remembered that I forgot to turn the screw to lock in the CPU, so I fixed that and tried again. This time it POSTed, and freaked out since there was nothing connected to the computer.
So now I knew that I didn't kill it. Now it was either overclocked or the same speed it always was and I wasted a ton of time. I screwed everything back in without ending up with any spare parts. I hit the power button, and went into the BIOS which reported the stock 2.0gHz. I really wasn't fazed at this since it thought it wouldn't read the right speed anyway. Then I exited and let Windows boot.
IT FROZE!!!!! YAY!!!!!!!! crash=overclocked. Just to be sure I rebooted it and it BSODed. The crashes put me in a much much better mood.
The next part is long and boring so I'll just summarize it. Vmods of 1.35V and 1.4V didn't help at all. If anything the computer just crashed sooner. I was too impatient to let the computer cool down for hours, and started getting pretty angry at Dell since they thought that laptop fans shouldn't turn on until 75C. So I put the DOS i8kfan onto a floppy, booted to that, and ran the fans on high for a while. Then it was cool enough to boot into safe mode. Eventually I got into full Windows by putting an Ice pack underneath the laptop.
I found out that the CPU was only stable up to 38C, which is ridiculous for a laptop. BSODs would happen at around 45C. I could only run it at full load for around 10-15 seconds. I once coldbooted straight into superpi and got 41s into a 1M run. As the bios reported earlier, the computer has no idea that it's overclocked 33%. This means that it saw no reason to change its memory divider. Somehow the 266mhz 2.5-3-3-6 ram is 100% stable in the Rightmark Stability Tests at 354mhz with 2-3-3-5 timings. I also put in a 333mhz stick, and that ran fine at its 266mhz CAS2 timings. I can't complain about that.
Unfortunately the system really wasn't usable at 2.66ghz. The last thing I would do in the whole world was undo the mod. I spent oodles of time finding out the hard way that rmclock and NHC couldn't use the old speedstep that my CPU had. I would disable speedstep in the bios which would make it run at the 12x muliplier, but windows would conveniently override the BIOS as soon as it loaded. I looked for the ancient Intel Speedstep utility that the BIOS referred to but couldn't find it anywhere. Eventually I downloaded speedswitchXP, which worked perfectly. I have to thank Christian Diefer for making his great laptop programs.
So that's pretty much it. I made this whole post on my i8200 with a 533fsb. My CPU is a C1 revision, and I'm trying to get a D1 of the same speed off of ebay. I have no idea at all why so many people are bidding on these old CPUs that aren't anywhere near the top speed for 400mhz bus CPUs. Maybe all of them figured out how to run them at 2.66ghz like me. Or maybe not. I thought of getting a 2.2ghz D1, but I figure that I only have around a 10% chance of getting it stable so I decided against it. I do have what could be a giant problem though. I was lazy and never bothered flashing the bios to the most recent A14 version. Mine's only A06. In two of the updates the description says that they introduced support for newer processors. This could be the D1 revision. I'm hoping that it was really only higher clocked cpu support. The bios says it's running at 1.2 (1.6)ghz, which is stable, but I don't know if it would revert back to 2.66 if I flash it. It's a good thing that summer is over. Maybe leaving it outside overnight will cool it down enough for a flash.
It'd be sweet if I could get a true 533mhz mobile cpu to run. HT would be really nice. There are several obstacles though like much higher voltages that need to be lowered, an IHS to remove, better cooling for higher clocks and volts, hoping the PSU and motherboard capacitors don't explode, and hoping that the system won't flip out because of a different speedstep and HT. Right now I have AS5 on the CPU with MX-2 on the way. I also could pull out the fans of my i8000 and cram them behind the radiator for more airflow. The fans are small and I doubt that they'll draw enough current to kill the motherboard.
If you have any suggestions on more mods I'd be glad to hear them. BTW I really don't care at all how the computer would look afterward, as long as I could still call it a laptop.
The rest of the specs that matter:
512MB ram, 1 stick at 354mhz
60GB 5400rpm 8MB cache Seagate HD
64MB mobility 9000
the better UXGA screen
*I really do have an Uncle Bob. I didn't make him up like in Terminator 2.
[img=http://img219.imageshack.us/img219/1326/266v2fs5.th.jpg]
The long story:
On the 20th I got an i8200 from my Uncle Bob with a dead HD*. I pulled the HD out of my i8000, put it in, and had a fully functional i8200 in very good condition.
Since it was old and I have a better computer, I decided to mess with it. That means trying to overclock by any means necessary.
I knew a BSEL mod wouldn't work because the i8200 never shipped with a 533fsb, and would ignore any pinmods. I read online that the i8200 PLL/clock generator was a Cypress-W320, and wasn't programmable. I tried using SANDRA to confirm this but it couldn't detect the PLL. I looked it up at digikey.com and found that if I soldered two frequency select pins together that it would output a 133mhz fsb signal, instead of 100. I also read from somewhere else that it was on the back of the motherboard.
So I took the whole laptop apart. The motherboard was a huge pain and was stuck in the casing in the back-left corner. I swore some and in the end got it out very forcibly with a screwdriver. Next I was pissed off flipping the motherboard over and over looking for the PLL. It was hidden under the CD-ROM drive and I didn't even have to take out the graphics card. It wasn't a Cypress-W320, it was actually an ICS 9250805. I looked that up and it wasn't programmable, but had the same exact pinmod as the Cypress one.
Then a miracle happened; I did the best soldering job of my entire life. I can't describe how tiny and close together the pins are besides saying that they're really friggen tiny and really friggen close. I wanted to find out ASAP if it worked at all, especially since if I did the soldering with the chip backwards I would have soldered a VCC and ground, leaving no reason to take the time reassembling the computer.
With everything missing except the CPU cooler and the graphics card with the monitor plugged in but not screwed I hit the power button. I said &#%@ when it blanked-screened and powered off. Then I remembered that I forgot to turn the screw to lock in the CPU, so I fixed that and tried again. This time it POSTed, and freaked out since there was nothing connected to the computer.
So now I knew that I didn't kill it. Now it was either overclocked or the same speed it always was and I wasted a ton of time. I screwed everything back in without ending up with any spare parts. I hit the power button, and went into the BIOS which reported the stock 2.0gHz. I really wasn't fazed at this since it thought it wouldn't read the right speed anyway. Then I exited and let Windows boot.
IT FROZE!!!!! YAY!!!!!!!! crash=overclocked. Just to be sure I rebooted it and it BSODed. The crashes put me in a much much better mood.
The next part is long and boring so I'll just summarize it. Vmods of 1.35V and 1.4V didn't help at all. If anything the computer just crashed sooner. I was too impatient to let the computer cool down for hours, and started getting pretty angry at Dell since they thought that laptop fans shouldn't turn on until 75C. So I put the DOS i8kfan onto a floppy, booted to that, and ran the fans on high for a while. Then it was cool enough to boot into safe mode. Eventually I got into full Windows by putting an Ice pack underneath the laptop.
I found out that the CPU was only stable up to 38C, which is ridiculous for a laptop. BSODs would happen at around 45C. I could only run it at full load for around 10-15 seconds. I once coldbooted straight into superpi and got 41s into a 1M run. As the bios reported earlier, the computer has no idea that it's overclocked 33%. This means that it saw no reason to change its memory divider. Somehow the 266mhz 2.5-3-3-6 ram is 100% stable in the Rightmark Stability Tests at 354mhz with 2-3-3-5 timings. I also put in a 333mhz stick, and that ran fine at its 266mhz CAS2 timings. I can't complain about that.
Unfortunately the system really wasn't usable at 2.66ghz. The last thing I would do in the whole world was undo the mod. I spent oodles of time finding out the hard way that rmclock and NHC couldn't use the old speedstep that my CPU had. I would disable speedstep in the bios which would make it run at the 12x muliplier, but windows would conveniently override the BIOS as soon as it loaded. I looked for the ancient Intel Speedstep utility that the BIOS referred to but couldn't find it anywhere. Eventually I downloaded speedswitchXP, which worked perfectly. I have to thank Christian Diefer for making his great laptop programs.
So that's pretty much it. I made this whole post on my i8200 with a 533fsb. My CPU is a C1 revision, and I'm trying to get a D1 of the same speed off of ebay. I have no idea at all why so many people are bidding on these old CPUs that aren't anywhere near the top speed for 400mhz bus CPUs. Maybe all of them figured out how to run them at 2.66ghz like me. Or maybe not. I thought of getting a 2.2ghz D1, but I figure that I only have around a 10% chance of getting it stable so I decided against it. I do have what could be a giant problem though. I was lazy and never bothered flashing the bios to the most recent A14 version. Mine's only A06. In two of the updates the description says that they introduced support for newer processors. This could be the D1 revision. I'm hoping that it was really only higher clocked cpu support. The bios says it's running at 1.2 (1.6)ghz, which is stable, but I don't know if it would revert back to 2.66 if I flash it. It's a good thing that summer is over. Maybe leaving it outside overnight will cool it down enough for a flash.
It'd be sweet if I could get a true 533mhz mobile cpu to run. HT would be really nice. There are several obstacles though like much higher voltages that need to be lowered, an IHS to remove, better cooling for higher clocks and volts, hoping the PSU and motherboard capacitors don't explode, and hoping that the system won't flip out because of a different speedstep and HT. Right now I have AS5 on the CPU with MX-2 on the way. I also could pull out the fans of my i8000 and cram them behind the radiator for more airflow. The fans are small and I doubt that they'll draw enough current to kill the motherboard.
If you have any suggestions on more mods I'd be glad to hear them. BTW I really don't care at all how the computer would look afterward, as long as I could still call it a laptop.
The rest of the specs that matter:
512MB ram, 1 stick at 354mhz
60GB 5400rpm 8MB cache Seagate HD
64MB mobility 9000
the better UXGA screen
*I really do have an Uncle Bob. I didn't make him up like in Terminator 2.
