Thursday, February 10, 2000

Introduction Socket 370 processors, such as the new FC-PGA Coppermine, are becoming more, and more popular. The reason is simple. That is, the Socket 370 standard costs less to manufacture, and is thus costs less for the consumer. That said, many users possess motherboards that are equipped with a sole, Slot 1 processor slot, and have until now been unable to benefit from Socket 370 processors. To that end, Iwill has designed, and created an adapter capable of supporting PPGA, or even FC-PGA, processors on Slot 1 boards. This adapter consists of a Socket 370PGA, installed onto a small circuit board, which can be inserted into a Slot 1 connector. Thanks to this adapter, it is now quite possible to use PPGA, or FC-PGA processors with Slot 1 boards. With the Iwill adapter, users have access to a wider variety of processors than ever; namely the Pentium II & III, Celeron PPGA, and the new FC-PGA Coppermine families from Intel. In fact, even some Cyrix processors are supported! That all said, let's take a closer look...

Description

The card in question is quite simple in design, as you can see from the above-featured photo. In the upper right-hand corner of the circuit board, one can locate the series of jumpers that are set according to the processor to be used.

Through the options provided by these jumpers, it's possible to adjust the core voltage of the processor according to 31 possible settings, change the identity of the processor (Intel, or Cyrix), select the type of processor (PPGA, or FC-PGA), and select the FSB speed (auto, 66Mhz, 100Mhz, or 133Mhz). You may have the same opinion as I did, that these jumpers don't provide anything particularly spectacular, but they are quite easy to find, and use - meaning that the user doesn't have to annoy themselves with them for too long.

The Tests

The principal question that I want to answer in these tests, was whether this adapter was capable to perform as good as when the processor is installed directly on the KW15 own socket 370, with my recently-purchased 500E processor. Immediately following are the results of that test.

The configuration of the test system, was as follows:

Motherboard: Fic KW15
Motherboard revision: 1.2
BIOS revision: VD410
CPU: Intel Coppermine 500E FC-PGA
Memory: 64Mbb PC100 SDram (LGS)
IDE Primary port master: Quantum Fireball KA 9.1gig UDMA66
IDE Primary port slave: none
IDE secondary port master: Quantum Fireball EIDE ST 3.2A
IDE secondary port slave: Kenwood 52X True X
Graphics driver version: 4.11.01.1272
OS: Win98 build 4.10
DirectX 6.1

Ziff Davis Winstone99 - Winbench99

Video sub-system tests

As you can see, there are minimal differences between using the Intel FC-PGA Coppermine 500E at 500Mhz installed directly on the motherboard, or installed on the Slocket II adapter. In fact, the tests do favor the Slocket II more often than not.

Conclusions

The idea of implementing a PGA adapter is quite interesting in terms of the additional processors supported as provided by the adapter itself. By providing access to a wide array of processors, this product allows one to greatly extend the lifetime of a motherboard, by allowing the use of the newest processors on the market. In short, I heartily recommend the Iwill Slocket II adapter to anyone interested in upgrading their system, without having to invest in a new motherboard.

For additional information, visit Iwill.

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