Celeron 1GHz "Monell"

A typical Home/office middle-class unit from 2002. It has Celeron, but 1GHz which was these times a psychological barrier. Graphics card is not revolutionary - ordinary GeForce 2 MX400 with 64MB of VRAM, plugged to AGP slot. The computer contains quite large these times amount of RAM (512MB) and a modem, which means that it was used to access the Internet wuth phone connection. These connections were popular in my country until early 2010s.
Generally, nothing extraordinary. Typical machine from early 2000s.

Approx. year 2002

Class ATX
CPU Intel Celeron (Tualatin Core)
Speed 1GHz
RAM 512MB (256MB+128MB+128MB)
DIMM PC100/133
ROM Award/Phoenix BIOS
Mainboard DFI CS62TC
Graphics nVidia GeForce 2 MX400
64MB, AGP
Sound Onboard AC97 chip
Ports I/O Onboard,
2xCOM, LPT, USB
Network MPX EN5038A, PCI,
100MBit, RJ45
System expansion bus 1x AGP slot
6x PCI slots
1x ACR/AMR slot
Floppy/removable media drives 1x 3.5" 1.44MB floppy disk drive
 
 
Hard disks/ATA devices: Seagate U6 ST340810A,
IDE/PATA, 40GB

LG DVD drive (PATA)

Peripherals in collection:
 - None
Other boards:

 

 Conexant CX11252 modem (PCI)
Casing ATX tower
Non-standard expansions: None
Operating system(s): Windows 2000

I got my unit in a very bad condition. Mainboard didn't started up at all, and power supply had bad capacitors. This mainboard is really prone to capacitor plague so it is recommended to replace capacitors. I found that bad capacitors caused some effects in sound codec powering section, the small 78L05 was blown because of ripple coming into it. After replacing these components mainboard started to operate properly.
Later I found that someone tried to remove CPU heatsing and broken heatsink mounting protrusions in socket. Fortunately I had replacement heatsink and a large fan with special clamp catching all protrusions, not only these in center.
Now I use it to play old games. This configuration is really nice for them, most titles from 1990s will work, especially if we dual-boot to Win98, and some from early 2000s will be playable too.

Contents: Starting, usage Drivers  

Starting

Very typical mainboard, with normal Award/Phoenix BIOS. The only problem is that it supports maximum 512MB of RAM and won't support more. The best CPU which can be ran there on factory parameters is Celeron 1.2GHz. But it's Celeron on last PIIIs - Tualatin - core.

Because it's Celeron on Tualatin core, it can be overclocked. BIOS supports overclocking very well, and without touching voltage I reached 1.4GHz of stable operation by moving FSB frequency, which is quite impressive as for 1GHz CPU. However, these particular Celerons, sometimes known as Tualerons, which are in fact underclocked PIIIs with stripped down cache, very well overclockable and can reach high frequencies. If mainboard is good, and DFI is a good mainboard, and you will put a PC133 memory with a nice margin for higher frequencies, it is possible to go past 1.33GHz barrier.

A downside of this mainboard is quite orthodox maintaining of CPU fan speed. If its RPM is below some value, the system doesn't boot and emits two alternating sounds, like an alarm. I found that using larger CPU fan which has lower RPM is sufficient to trigger this alarm.

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Drivers

DFI CS62 Mainboard - Manual + BIOS
Connexant CX11252 modem driver for Win9x/2K/XP
SMBus driver for mainboard-related missing components

-> Realtek AC'97 driver (WDM_AA406.EXE) - download from CNet
-> nVidia driver ver. 77.22: 2K/XP, 9x - for GeForce 2 MX400 board - download from nVidia page. Big thanks to them for archiving old drivers.
 

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