@Formula350
Looks like you got shafted as well. This reminds me of a corporate deal that a friend got. He knew before he bought the PCs that they had M590's in them and asked me. I said "Don't do it!" which included words such as $%^! and even "$£%!!!!!!!!!!!!! but he went ahead anyway. Well, other than the crap performance, they all worked ok for a good couple of years at least, which is really odd and he got lucky. I can only think that these were a later batch made after the scandal broke, so they didn't just make duds and send them out as working boards.
You're right about that overclock being high percentage wise. It was an increase from either 400MHz or 450MHz, I can't remember now and you could feel it on the desktop, too. How those chips managed it with such a crap cooler and no thermal paste, I dunno.
I can't remember if there was voltage control on this thing or not, now.
This mobo was so unstable, that nothing you did got rid of it, including significant underclocking. The RAM sockets were a joy: you could wobble the modules with ease, although it didn't seem to trigger a bsod directly.
Man, I hated this thing and it still raises my blood pressure thinking about it today. I have to confess that I was new to PCs then and I actually had a local PC dealer build a PC for me at a spec I specified and at the lowest cost.
That's unthinkable nowadays. Don't tell anyone I ever did this, will you?
Having a system built, at least to your specs, I feel is less embarrassing than say... buying a DELL or HP
Now it's highly unlikely that the CPU and heatsink had a true enough surface to make a ideal bond, I'm willing to bet that while the older fab process (IE: very large dies) were the result of poor overclocking, it is also the reason for their hearty nature which allowed for improved stability at increased temperatures. As an example my neighbor got a Celeron 333MHz Slot-1 system right after we bought another Packard Bell (hey, the first one treated us well enough that we were repeat customers lol) which had a K6-2 300Mhz, and while the majority of the system went by the wayside, the CPU he held onto. Now he was a paraplegic and for anyone who isn't familiar with that term, a spinal injury left him paralyzed from the shoulders down. He
did have arm control, just no hand/finger control at all
That didn't stop him from being very good at playing games both console AND computer with the keyboard! I know I'm veering off topic a bit, but the way he managed to game on a computer is rather fascinating as I challenge anyone to try and do that w/o hand control. Basically if you let your hand go limp and notice how your fingers sort of curl, that's how his were, so he would basically wrest his hand on the arrow keys to somehow manage to roll his fingers onto them to control the game he was playing, and it wasn't sloppy either... he was VERY very good at Quake 2 multiplayer! He even got banned from a server for suspicion of using an aimbot
Whats more is now imagine using the mouse w/o finger control! He trained his brain to use the mouse
sideways, with the mouse cord facing the keyboard (he was right handed)! So like arrow key movement, he would roll his hand to the left either slightly back or forwards to click the L or R mouse bottoms
Anyways story aside, the reason I mention that is because any computer work involving hardware you can imagine the complexity of him building a system. Normally I'd do it for him as he knew I liked doing that anyways, but his Ex-Wife needed a computer and so he built her one using that Celeron 333... Now I don't know if this was out of spite, or because he obviously couldn't install it, but there was
NO heatsink on that thing... and it ran stable... o_0 I actually have the board and CPU, because they upgraded from that system later on, but I might have toasted one of them in my playing around (literally, playing). It obviously got really hot w/o a sink, so I was using it as a heatsink testbed and had flipped all the dipswitches to make it run at 100MHz FSB and like 933Mhz or something
I had tried the system recently because it's the only one with ISA slots, which I wanted to test some nostalgia hardware a friend bought off eBay, but it wouldn't power on sadly. I had put a heatsink on it too, so
excess heat wasn't the reason, but it could be the motherboard too and I won't know unless I get another CPU(or Slocket)+Slot-1 board from somewhere to test everything.
Alright I've clearly rambled enough!
(Not even a laptop can best me lol...
