Pentium III 550
One of the first Pentium IIIs not for a high-end
market, 550MHz Slot 1 CPU with cache chips on board separate from core
(Katmai). The CPU has been installed in Abit BE6 mainboard with AGP
video card, audio and network boards. There is a CD-RW drive and a 18GB
HDD too. Everything is packed into quite fancy ATX case.
Late Pentium II and early Pentium III mainboards contained different
additions not typically seen in earlier computers - this mainboard has,
in addition to standard ATA controllers, faster IDE 66 hard disk
controller with own ROM (HighPoint HPT366).
Katmai Pentium IIIs became cheaper and more accessible in early 2000,
being the first affordable Pentium IIIs for home segment. This was
mostly related to better Coppermine core which, with 133MHz bus and
built-in fast cache, became a first choice for a high-end, multimedia
authoring and gaming segment while existing stock of Katmai CPUs had
been sold with lower prices. It was much more than enough to run ofice
application and play older games and it was still much better than even
cheaper Celerons which were chosen for office purposes.
Approx. year | 2000 | |
Class | ATX | |
CPU | Intel Pentium III | |
Speed | 550MHz | |
RAM | 64MB (DIMM PC100) |
|
ROM | Award | |
Mainboard | Abit BE6 | |
Graphics | AGP nVidia TNT2 | |
Sound | ES1373 PCI card | |
Ports I/O | Onboard USB, COM, 1x LPT, PS/2, 4xPATA, FDD. |
|
Network | Realtek RTL8139 PCI, RJ45 |
|
System expansion bus | 1x AGP slot 5x PCI slot 2x ISA slot |
|
Floppy/removable media drives | 1x 3.5" 1.44MB floppy
disk drive |
|
Hard disks/ATA devices: |
SSeagate 18GB (PATA) TEAC CD-W516EB CD-RW drive (PATA) |
|
Peripherals in collection: |
||
Other boards:
|
None | |
Casing | ATX tower | |
Non-standard expansions: | None | |
Operating system(s): | MS Windows 98 |
My unit has been bought as a home computer. It was built by a local computer shop and service (they still exist, but their main sales now are notebooks), and later it was upgraded a few times. It has been rebuilt using the leftovers form upgrades to be as close to primary spec as possible.
Contents: | Starting, usage | Drivers |
Starting
The most important thing here is the PATA setup, if a
drive doesn't work as autodetected, it should be configured in second
ROM.
Next, if a drive in ATA66 is installed, it should be installed in a
system with controller's drivers because without it will run in reduced
speed.
Some boards don't easily fit into PCI, causing system to lag. After replacing their locations it works. Especially vulnerable configuration is a network adapter in the second PCI slot looking from AGP slot.
Mainboard manual and drivers:
https://soggi.org/motherboards/abit/BE6.htm
Drivers for nVidia TNT2 can still be found on nVidia archive pages:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/win9x_archive.html
ES1373 Win9x driver for sound card | |
RTL8139 driver - network adapter driver for Win98/ME |