Let's face it, most of us just don't have the money it takes to put together a brand new computer. Unless you're getting a big tax refund (which is really not a refund if you think about it. All it means is you over paid your taxes), plucking down a few grand in one shot is not something we can do everyday.

So what do you do if you have a computer that is so out of date it can't even run a game of Pong; much less GL Pong. My brother was in this situation with his Pentium 233. The system was very nice when we made it over a year ago, and it can still run allot of the non demanding games and aps. However it simply was not fast enough for the latest and greatest 3D games.

What we set out to do was plan the cheapest upgrade possible that gave us the performance we wanted. The end result is a 458Mhz system for a net cost of just $200. Here is how we did it.

The System.

The system we upgraded has the following equipment:

Pentium 233MMX
32 Megs of EDO Ram (Remember those?)
19" no name AT/ATX case
16 speed CD Rom
4.3 Gig Quantum Fireball HD
Matrox Mistake 220, I mean Mystique 220
Diamond Monster 3D (not the II)
Sound Blaster 16
Acer PCI network card
USR 56K modem
100 Meg Internal Zip drive
15" Optiquest monitor

What we did was removed the CPU, motherboard, 2 video cards, ram and modem. We then replaced it with the following:

Abit BH6 motherboard
Intel Celeron 366 (retail box)
64 Meg PC-100 SDRam
Creative Lab 16 Meg TNT Blaster

You will note that we never put back in a modem. This is because the computer is part of the LAN and can access the internet with the network card using WinGate.

Why a Celeron 366 and not a 300a?

The choice of using a Celeron 366 instead of a Celeron 300a are many. The first is that you can't find Celeron 300a anymore. And if you do find them, they want an arm and a leg for it! Nearly all Celeron 366 will do 458Mhz without much problems. However, the number of 300a that can do 450 are going lower and lower. I have recently gone though 5 OEM 300a and did not find one that was stable at 450Mhz. The longest that one lasted before locking up was 15 minute. We used a retail Celeron because they overclock better than OEM units. They also come with a nice heatsink fan that I put to good use.

The one problem that might be of concern is that in order to get 458Mhz from a Celeron 366, you have to use the 83Mhz bus of the Abit motherboard. Allot of PCI devices have problems running at this bus speed. Make sure you select components that can work at that bus speed. Overlcockers.com have a listing of devices that works on the 83Mhz bus.

When you look at the cost of those 300a that are guaranteed to hit 450 and compare them to the cost of a Celeron 366, I would go with a 366. With a Celeron 366, 458Mhz is pretty much a given and there is a small chance that the CPU can hit 550Mhz. To give the Celeron 366 we had a good shot at hitting 550, we decided to do our own version of the Celery Sandwich.

The Celery Sandwich

Let's face it, the current crop of Celeron coolers are no match when compared to what is available for the PIIs. Many people have tried to make PII heatsinks work on Celerons for greater performance. Nearly all these conversion requires some kind of drilling. I wanted to avoid doing that. I also didn't want to buy 2 heatsinks so I made use of the factory Intel heatsink. The net result is one HUGE system. The idea for this cooler came from the Heatsink Guide. The difference between his and mine was I  made use of the factory heatsink that came with the Celeron, thereby saving the cost of the VEK 12 sink the Heatsink Guide used for the back.

The first thing to do when making a Celeron sandwich is to tape up the back side of the Celeron to protect it from the heatsink. I use masking tape that is used by commercial printers to mask off negatives before they shoot the plate. This stuff works really well. Doesn't leave any residue. You can use 3M tape if you can't find the printer's stuff.

The main heatsink in this sandwich is a Computer Nerd FAP2X3B-25. This PII cooler is different from other PII cooler. It uses clamps instead of clips to mount. The clamps lock around the PII and are tighten with screws. The sink is really big and works really well. This was the sink I was using on the Project 560 system before I switch it over to the Alpha 125. If it's good enough to cool a PII at 560Mhz, it should be good enough to cool a Celeron at 550Mhz.

Instead of clamping the sink around a PII, like it was designed for, I clamped it to the back of the factory Intel heatsink and sandwiched the Celeron in between. The whole thing took just 10 minutes to do from start to finished! Of course I used heatsink grease on the front and back of the CPU.

This is how the finished system looks inside the case. The radio shack blowers and the intake fan help to bring cool air in. The power supply fan was flipped to exhaust hot air. Running at 458Mhz @ 2.0V, the heatsinks doesn't even get warm to the touch. The system has never exceeded 31C, even after 4 hours of LAN Quaking (I know, you're wondering how we get any work done :-)).

Everything swapped over without much problems. The only trouble we ran into was that the original system used an AT motherboard and therefore had an AT power connector to the motherboard. This does not fit into the ATX connector of the Abit BH6. My brother, being the cheap ass that he is, decided to spliced the wires to make it work with the BH6! I don't recommend you do this unless you know what you're doing. When it was all said and done, he confessed that he should have just paid the extra $30 for a new ATX power supply. :-)

How did you get all this stuff for just $200?

The total cost of the equipment at the time we got them, about 2 months ago, was $700 Canadian. So how did we end up doing this for $200? Well, believe it or not, my brother sold the CPU, AT motherboard, Matrox 220, Monster 3D, 32 megs ram, and 56K modem for $500!  Damn! He can sell!

As of today (April 13, 1999) You can get all the equipment listed for this upgrade for as low as $550 CDN. Not bad for a system that is just as fast as a PII-450.

The Big Question: Can This Thing Run At 550Mhz?

Well, no it doesn't. I tried every trick in the book and the best it would do is lock up at the Windows splash screen. Which is still better than the stock heatsink, which just produced a blank screen. It looks like super cooling is required to make this Celeron run at 550Mhz. And super cooling is what we're going to do, but that's for another article. :-)