Wow, thanks for all the good info. This board is version 1.05. I was thinking about going with the 8 x 100 PIII. But did not realize that the voltage limit would bite me. It was sort of an attractive way to go for me since I have about 700 mg lying around. But I wanted to with at least 1 gig hz on each cpu. I actually built this server originally for a company and has run 24 x 7 for nearly 8 years. Sort of aggravated to find out the Adaptec does not provide drivers for XP for the AAA-131U2. Was and expensive card way back when.
Considering the obstacles, the cost of the processors, the age etc I think I will just pick up an MSI ATI 200 express m/b and 939 processor.
But I appreciate all your input - btw - I had upgraded the bios to 14.003 while I was playing around with it.
There's still a way to get your 1.05 (or older) P2B-D to take two PIII-850 or two PIII-1000.
I saved an article that shows how to modify any slot one Coppermine PIII to request 1.80 volts from the motherboard. (All P2B-D boards can supply 1.80 volts to the processors. This is only .10 volts more than the official voltage for PIII-1000, or .15 volts more than for the PIII-850. A .15v increase that shouldn't be harmful to the processor. I've run dual PIII-800 at 1.80 volts for weeks without problems.
I couldn't find this article tonight using Google. But if you're interested, I can zip up the webpage that I saved and send it to you. Here are some of the text contents of the webpage. (There are great pictures that I of course can't include here. They make the procedure look very easy.)
Dual PIII 1.12 Ghz on the Asus P2B-DS Rev 1.04
"the PIII 1Ghz/100Mhz Slot 1 processor is designed for 1.7v core. This is no problem for newer P2D-DS boards (Rev 1.06 and higher) - just plug in the processors and boot up - but gives us a problem on older revision boards.
"There are five voltage identification pins (named VID[0-4]) on the Slot 1 connector. These pins are used to support automatic selection of power supply voltages. These pins are not signals, but are either an open circuit (logic 1) or a short circuit to ground (logic 0) on the processor. The combination of opens and shorts defines the voltage required by the processor core. The power supply must supply the voltage that is requested or disable itself. The table below shows the VID[0-4] logic states for 1.7v (Pentium III 1Ghz/100Mhz Slot 1) and 1.8v (minimum available on P2B-DS rev 1.05 and lower)."
Voltage VID0 VID1 VID2 VID3 VID4
(Pin B120) (Pin A120) (Pin A119) (Pin B119) (Pin A121)
1.7 1 1 1 0 0
1.8 1 0 1 0 0"If we can change VID1 from a '1' (open circuit) to a '0', (short circuit to ground), the processor will appear to be requesting 1.8v. This might sound like a task requiring some delicate work with a soldering iron, however there is a better way. VID4 (Pin A121) is a '0' and is adjacent to VID1 (Pin A120), which we need to change to a '0'.
Slot 1 Processor VID Pins
"A120 and A121 are the last two pins to the right on the heatsink side of the processor.
"If we look closely at the Slot 1 connectors on the motherboard, there is
a tiny gold contact for each pin on the processor. The contacts are spring
loaded, and are forced outward when the processor is inserted into the slot.
The upper ends of the contacts are visible in the small rectangular holes
on the top of the Slot 1 connector, and move back and forth in these holes
as the processor is inserted and removed. If we insert a small U-shaped
piece of wire into the rectangular holes corresponding to pins A120 and
A121, the gold contacts will be forced against the wire when the processor
is inserted, thus connecting A120 to A121 and changing the processor
voltage request from 1.7v to 1.8v
"The U-shaped wire used to connect pins A120 and A121 should be about 3mm tall and 1 mm wide. It also needs to be just the right diameter. I don't have a micrometer to measure the diameter but I used the thickest wire I could find which would fit into the rectangular hole in the top of the Slot 1 connector easily. Use tweezers to drop the wire into the holes. Put wires in both Slot 1 connectors.
"Now insert your processors and connect the fan cables to the headers on the motherboard. I recommend setting the FSB jumpers for 100Mhz initially, although my system is perfectly stable with the FSB at 112Mhz. The CPU multiplier jumpers do not need to be set as the multiplier is locked at 10x on the Pentium III 1Ghz/100Mhz Slot 1 processor."
The pictures on this webpage make this method very clear. (My copy of the webpage was saved as an MHT webarchive document via Internet Explorer.)
Regards, Bill
