Turning A $20 Craigslist Purchase Into A 500MHz Gaming Powerhouse

Last year I picked up a couple of computers as part of a Craigslist purchase from a local seller. One the computers cost $20 and was described by the seller as "nothing special". It had a PC Chips M572 motherboard with an i430TX chipset, Pentium 133MHz CPU, 40MB of ram, 40GB hard drive, 1.44MB 3.5 floppy drive, DVD drive, 8MB ATI RageXL PCI video card and a low end Ensoniq PCI sound card. I was originally going  to take the motherboard out, but there was something about that motherboard that I remembered it could be upgraded with a much better CPU. I checked online and there was indeed a patched BIOS available to allow for the use of a K6-2+ or K6-III+ CPU. I download the patched BIOS and applied the BIOS update to the motherboard. The M572 motherboard has PnP CPU setup in the BIOS. There are no jumpers to set. This makes for easy changes to the motherboard. You can set the voltage from 2.0 to 3.5 volts, FSB speed of 60, 66, 75, or 83 MHz and CPU multiplier of 1.5 to 5.5.

I set to work to upgrade the computer and start the transformation. First up was a K6-III+ CPU. The K6-III+ CPU maps a multiplier of 2.0 to 6.0. This allows for 6.0x83MHz FSB or 500MHz clock speed. I decided to try for the maximum possible clock speed even though 83MHz can cause some issues with addon cards and peripherals. Luckily, I did not run into any. The motherboard can use 4x72-pin SIMMs or 2x168-pin SDRAM DIMMs. I installed 2x128MB SDRAM DIMMs for a total 256MB, which is the maximum allowed on this motherboard. The one negative aspect of the Intel i430 chipset is that the L2 motherboard cache can only address the first 64MB of ram. This means the other 192MB would not be cached and cause performance problems. Luckily the K6-III+ has an onboard 256K L2 cache of its own that covers all of your available memory. This in turns makes the motherboard cache in effect an L3 cache. This makes the use of that K6-III+ highly desirable. I used a 3dfx Voodoo 3 2000 16MB PCI card. I added active cooling and was able to overclock it from 143MHz to 166MHz. Putting it at the same speed as a Voodoo 3 3000. I then installed a Sound Blaster AWE64 Value model CT4380 with a SIMMCONN adapter to allow for use of a 32MB 72-pin SIMM, giving 28MB of sound font memory. For networking I went with an Intel PRO1000/GT PCI network adapter. Finally, I installed a CompactFlash to IDE adapter with an 8GB CompactFlash card running Windows 98 SE.

I had to fight some issues with BIOS settings and tweaks, but after working through all of those, this computer has run flawlessly for the last several months. The most satisfying aspect of this is I had the majority of the parts laying around and could just put them together to get this wonderful system as an outcome. The only thing I added after the fact was the Sound Blaster AWE64 Value instead of the Sound Blaster 16 I was originally using. Even though this is not a Super 7 motherboard with AGP and 100MHz FSB speed, it rivals even some of those boards because of the 83Mhz FSB speed which overclocks the PCI bus. As the old saying goes if you have lemons, you make lemonade. I am so glad I did not take out that motherboard!