Blast from the Past. i8600 heavily overclocked

The inverter board on this laptop died so I figured that I'd play with it. It's a Dell Inspiron 8600. I remembered being able to undervolt it a lot, so I figured it would overclock well (for a banias). I soldered the frequency select pins on the PLL together to get the 533 fsb.

At 1.484V (default): post 25% of time
At 1.612V: POST 100% of time, possibly load windows if CPU HS has ice cube on it.
At 1.708V: POST 100% of time, load windows if cold boot.

1.708V is max btw.

I figured that I may have gotten the Banias WR by default since people only ever overclocked Dothans. None of my 333mhz DDR sticks could handle the 33% OC. One could POST sometimes, while the other resulted in LED light codes. Luckily I had a 266mhz stick from an i8200. All 3 of my DDR1 memory sticks can run 266 * 1.33, so I got 1GB of stable ram in the system. Neither thaiphoon burner or SPDtool can recognize the memory in the i8600 or the i8200, so I can't flash the 333 sticks to CAS3 instead of the CAS2.5 default to try 333mhz * 1.33.

Note that working with a laptop with a dead inverter board is difficult. Things are dark. I might replace it and buy a Dothan off Ebay for $8 (including shipping) to have a spare system.



I got superpi to complete at 2.13! 130nm FTW!