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...