Evergreen Spectra 400 - The Ultimate Socket 5/7 Upgrade CPU!

[@RichardG867]

Thanks for mentioning my catalog of decoded Evergreen BIOS updates. I've actually been a subscriber for a while! Small world. It was a pain to reverse engineer but I eventually got it done in a roundabout way.

[@vswitchzero]

Haha small world indeed! Thanks so much for providing that archive of extracted BIOS files! They will come in handy for a lot of folks trying to get unsupported CPUs going on older boards. How did Evergreen compress/encode these out of curiosity? Thanks again! 🙂👍

[@RichardG867]

​@@vswitchzero I wasn't able to determine the compression method because 16-bit reverse engineering is a pain, but I did figure out the header for that and the multi-file archive format they came up with for the BIOS updates. Since a few text files get decompressed on startup, I ended up writing a script that went through each file in each BIOS archive, replaced one of the text files and ran the executable under a DOS emulator to extract it. This ultimately worked in the end. You're welcome!

[@vswitchzero]

@@RichardG867 Very clever solution, I love it. Thanks again!

[@spladam3845]

@@RichardG867 Great work around, well done sir. Wanted to add my thanks for your work.

[@rhuwyn]

@@RichardG867 Is there any easy ways to know what bios images go to what boards once you've extracted them?

[@philscomputerlab]

Great video 🙂

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks very much, Phil! Really appreciate it :)

[@ShowsOn]

This brings back many memories. I upgraded from a Pentium 133 to a K6-2 400 using the 6X multiplier. The new CPU only cost me $80 second hand.

[@nboy7]

I miss the days where you could make new hardware work on old boards like this, things like these Evergreen Spectras and the Intel overdrive. Also the fact that when Intel tried to abandon a platform AMD, Cyrix etc would come in and continue to support it.

[@ruxandy]

Well, those days are still around. For example, many people recently upgraded from a CPU like the Ryzen 5 1600 to a Ryzen 7 5800X3D on B350/X370 boards. And the performance difference is nothing short of amazing. Even better, you don’t need an adapter, it’s officially supported. 😊

[@mistermudpie]

@@ruxandy Getting a 5800X3D to work in something like an AM2 motherboard would really be amazing.

[@ruxandy]

@@mistermudpie Da, ar fi. 😀

[@DFX4509B]

@@ruxandy Even an R5 4500 with its cut-back L3 cache would still be a big jump from Zen1, as Zen2 with cut-back L3 cache is still Zen2 and is still a big jump from Zen1 for performance, plus what effectively amounts to an R5 3600 with less L3 cache is a steal at $80 r/n. Going back a little further, you could even get an FX-series part to work on some AM3 mainboards with a BIOS update, but that wasn't generally advisable due to the VRMs on AM3 boards being too weak for Bulldozer and Piledriver, where AM3+ boards that were designed for the FX-series CPUs had beefier VRMs than AM3 did, IIRC, Conversely, K10 AM3 silicon is backwards-compatible with AM3+ boards, so if you wanted to run a Phenom II X6 1100T on a 990FX AM3+ board instead of an FX part, you could, and it'll work.

[@BobTheBob9]

people have gotten 6 core intel 8000 chips working on z170 boards and stuff, it still happens just isn't widely done

[@3v249]

I miss the days of goodwill computer works. They used to have mail bins full of parts screws motherboards and vintage computers all on the cheap.

[@wysoft]

You used to be able to find great computer deals at Goodwill. Now they don't even sell them. Not sure why. Last year I dropped off some electronics recycling stuff and checked out the pile of PCs on a pallet ready to be recycled. I was blown away to see one of those Power Computing Mac clones sitting on the pallet. I almost grabbed it and drove off but I just don't need odd projects like that in my house any more.

[@JohnVance]

Nothing since has been as versatile as Socket 7. Really was a golden age of compatibility and experimentation. I hope some kind of RISC-V version can take off and do the same at some point.

[@3rdalbum]

AM4 is nearly eight years old and new CPUs for it were released this year (or maybe very late last year). I wouldn't be surprised if it lasts into 2025.

[@JohnVance]

@@3rdalbum good point, that’s what I’m running!

[@vswitchzero]

Indeed! AM4 has been an awesome long-lived platform 👍

[@mstover2809]

14:31 I remember fixing a computer for a friend that had put a K6-2 400 in it. He was unable to get windows to install so asked me to look at it. I had to de-clock it to 300MHz to install windows AND the patch for the faster CPU before returning the clock speed to 400MHz.

[@OzzFan1000]

As you may have already deduced, Unicore Sofware was a BIOS company that wrote and sold upgrade BIOS chips for PCs and compatibles. I had purchased a physical BIOS chip from them back in 1994 or 95 to upgrade the BIOS on my Packard Bell mini-tower so that it could run the AMD Am5x86 CPU and overcome my original BIOS's 504MB hard drive limit.

[@vswitchzero]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

[@kkolakowski]

I've upgraded from 486DX4/100 to K6-2 450Mhz around 1999. I remember being super excited about possibility of listening to MP3s in the background! Can you imagine, you can both listen to music and do something (playing Civ 2 in my case!)

[@jbaroli]

Lol with a 486 you could barely listen a low quality mp3 and you had to avoid moving your mouse cursor

[@kkolakowski]

@@jbaroli Yeah, something like that 😉 It definitely required tinkering with Winamp options and not doing anything else on the computer, but it was working.

[@chalcac3462]

A true nostalgia trip. That was true longetivity with a cpu upgrade providing proper speed increase :)

[@Markworth]

Ahh. The good old days when upgrading to a "3D card" was so substantial that it made your computer noticeably faster at everything. Never knew that this was a thing, though. Super cool.

[@alexrose1ukv2]

THANK YOU. I have been waiting for someone to cover these for years. I had the 333 or 400mhz version which we stuck in our p90 Compaq, I honestly don't remember which now, and had to upgrade to Windows 98 as it caused windows 95 to crash! (General Protection Fault iirc) and at the time we did not know about the Win95 patch. The system had fast page mode ram not even EDO, but it was still massively faster than it was with it's original pentium 90. Kept that system running until the early 2000s. I don't think we ever tried to upgrade the BIOS, I don't think my dad realised at the time we were meant to! Used to love playing games like Total Annihilation with the system and it's whopping 72mb of ram, and whatever GPU I'd scavenged at the time. I went through a number of S3/trident/cirrus logic etc and ended up with something with around 4MB of VRAM on a PCI bus. Loved that system.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for sharing! Love hearing these first hand accounts of the hardware 👍

[@alexrose1ukv2]

​@@vswitchzero it was an awesome time for hardware. So much new and change. Honestly it was incredible just how far these pushed a Pentium 1 era board, even with a locked down OEM system style board, they genuinely made the system feel new in so many titles. Not as good as a full upgrade with faster RAM etc, but it kicked the living snot out of a Pentium mmx or early P2 based system for many things, all else being reasonable. Your testing with the higher FSB really highlights just how much life these could bring. My father brought a new work system later on which had a 600mhz p3 and whilst that was miles faster, this overdrive chip felt closer to that, than the p90 it had replaced, and brought years of life to the system for around £150, if I remember correctly (admittedly that would be more like £250-300 in now money so it wasn't cheap). Absolutely worthwhile considering how much a new system cost at the time. The only unfortunate side was the fact we were stuck on Win 95, and back then we had genuinely no idea there was a way to patch that, in fact I think our Evergreen manual at the time said to upgrade to Windows 98 as there were compatibility issues with 95 (and indeed there was, it would crash during boot 3/4 of the time, although not ALWAYS, which was weird!)

[@Choralone422]

Back in those days I seriously considered an Evergreen Spectra 400 + K6-2 400 MHz for my Megatrends HX83 mainboard where I started with a K5 75 MHz (later a K6 200 MHz in 97) and 32 MB of EDO RAM. But I ended up with a great deal on an Abit BH6 + Celeron 300A + 128 MB PC100 SDRAM in early 1999. The 400+ MHz K6-2 chips had just been released in November 1998 but the lure of an overclocked 300A, the faster and higher capacity SDRAM, less than 18 months after getting the K6 was just too much to resist! That BH6 + 300A ran at 464 MHz, 103 MHz FSB for years until the board failed spectacularly while my parents owned the machine around 2003-2004. Still, the 486 through the Pentium 3 days were exciting with the amount of upgrade adapters that were on the market. I used a voltage adapter on my 486 PC to upgrade it with a AMD 5x86 133 MHz chip. And later on in the slot 1 days I used a slotket adapter to run a socket 370 CPU in a different slot 1 board than the Abit I previously mentioned.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for sharing! Always love hearing these first hand accounts of the hardware back in those days. The Celeron 300A was such a legend 😁

[@rchatte100]

I had a similar powerleap adapter. I imported it from the US to the UK. IIRC upgraded my Pentium 75 Mhz to a Pentium "tualatin" 233 Mhz with MMX. Made a huge difference!

[@primus711]

That isnt a tualatin Tualatins were pentium 3s

[@logipilot]

@@primus711 Maybe his mistake is not the powerleap nor the tualatin, but the P75... One would upgrade a Slot1 Pentium II 233MHz with a Powerleap Slot1--> Socket370 adapter to fit a Tualatin 1200MHz!

[@Miasmark]

Some of the other bioses on the CD are Microid Research or MR Bios which sold updated bioses to enable more features and enhance compatibility. the vendor who made the altered award bios you saw probably did the same. Evergreen must have gotten a special license for the bioses since they would have still been for sale which might be why the odd process to update the bios.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for your comment! That’s a good point, I’m sure you are right about that.

[@NMRotar]

I just built myself a budget gaming PC with 100 euro.I was surprised to see that I got some parts very cheap,from 7-8 years ago and they can still run 85-90% from all new games. Upgrading now is way more easier then in 90's . With all the Information available nowadays.... anyone can build anything,even a rocket spaceship 🚀

[@nebular-nerd]

I'm sure those updated BIOS's will benefit users even without having an Evergreen. Looks like they added some nice Quality Of Life upgrades and bug fixes.

[@vswitchzero]

Indeed! I know the Retro Web project is working to get them imported for all of the various socket 7 boards out there.

[@BigBadBench]

Love pushing hardware farther than intended, great vid!

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks! 😁

[@Smakificator]

It's great seeing the S3 Virge Video Cards receiving their just kudos finally. Great 2D Performance. Great DOS compatibility. Tiny and compatible VESA LFB Driver. Great performer with DOS / GUS Demos.

[@wysoft]

They were fantastic cards to pair up with when the Voodoo 1/2 were still hot. I had a Virge DX and it was compatible with everything, had great GUI and DOS performance. Even was able to run X11 on Redhat Linux with zero fuss right out of the box. The 3D functionality was just useless.

[@jkammueller]

My high school computer lab had tons of these installed in their Compaq Deskpro desktops that originally had 133 MHz Pentium CPUs. The original cooler had a long clip that attached all the way down to the original CPU socket. Great stuff!

[@jkammueller]

I'd buy one of these adapters if I didn't already have 4 systems with running 256KB enabled SRAM Cache modified AMD K6-II+/570ACZ as AMD K6-III+/600ACZ CPUs and AGP video. I also have a pentium MMX 233 system if need be. I may toss in one of these at some point into the 233 as it has a 66MHz FSB. I can see this adapter used in 100MHz FSB SS7 boards missing the 2.0V setting for maximum performance. Great stuff! :-)

[@SockyNoob]

Truly amazing results, absolute shame nothing like this is even attempted or possible. Great video documenting it.

[@DFX2KX]

the closest thing nowadays is AMD's AM4 platform, where my old 1700x *could* (as asrock has been kind enough to keep updating older motherboards) be upgraded all the way up to a 5000 series, and that would indeed be a significant jump in performance. But it wouldn't be 400%....

[@geekenspiel]

Good to see you back! Always learn something from your videos.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks so much! 😁👍

[@Grus0]

Great video! I'm acquainted with the Evergreen 5x86 upgrades (and the mad ebay prices they fetch now), but I wasn't even aware that their work extended into the Socket 7 era like this. It's perhaps even more impressive. Righteous shoutout to Necroware's excellent series too, showcasing the DIY path to this.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks very much! Yeah the prices for upgrade chips are getting pretty ridiculous on eBay. I got lucky and I don’t think the seller knew what it was so the price was very reasonable. I think I paid about $40 for it including shipping. Yes, Necroware’s VRM module is epic. Can’t wait to try it out on this board 😁👍

[@markgomersbach9265]

Great video again, had the luxury back then moving from a Cyrix 200 to a K6-3 550, now I did have the Voodoo1 already in the former system, but it still was a huge improvement!

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks very much! 🙂

[@spuds7677]

I was a computer\systems builder back in the late 90s early 2000s and I was the talk of the shop when I built my K62-550. I was able to have it running stable at 600 MHz. I had the voodoo 3 3000 video card and the games would look amazing on that system. I had that system together for a long time until the XP CPUs came out. What's funny, once i built my first AMD K6 system, I don't think I have ever had an Intel desktop system since. Even today, I run a AMD CPU.

[@sandmanxo]

The K6-2 was quite tolerant of higher voltage, as I ran about 30 of these(stock ones, not the evergreen) at my job in the 2000-2001 timeframe. Most boards only went down to 2.5v core which never gave me problems. I usually bought 450mhz versions and ran them on a 75mhz bus with the 6x multiplier. In theory most boards also had 83mhz busses but I rarely got the pci cards to play along with that speed.

[@wysoft]

Yep that was my first decent PC build - a K6-2 300 on one of those SIS "TXPro" boards that didn't have full split voltage support or 100MHz bus. I was able to run the K6-2 just fine using an undocumented 83MHz jumper setting and the lowest vcore the board supported.

[@spladam3845]

I've been watching reruns of Computer Chronicles in the afternoon to relax, there is something therapeutic about the entire aesthetic and the nostalgia, but you and a couple of others have become the modern technical compendium to that show, but looking backwards with the hindsight of history, and it's fascinating to have both views at once.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks so much Spladam, means a lot! 😁👍

[@chiel340]

Awesome video! I never knew these chips existed. They really made an obsolete system shine again. Keep up the good work and the great content!

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks so much! 🙂

[@bryndal36]

I went from the Pentium 166MMX to the AMD Duron 700 in 2001 on a newer motherboard and 128MB of ram and had a Voodoo Banshee from Quantum 3D for graphics. The jump was absolutely massive. I did the upgrade due to Diablo 2 coming out and wanted to be able to play it. I knew the P166MMX wouldn't be able to handle it so I bit the bullet. I also bought a 160gb HDD as the old 10GB that was formatted to 8.4GB due to the older motherboard's limitations was quickly running out of space. I still have that 160GB HDD as a boot drive in a X58 system I have sitting here next to me with an i7-930 cpu, 12gb ram and a 1tb drive for storage. It even has a gtx 760 gpu for all that Windows 7 gaming goodness. :)

[@brothervan3884]

I had the Spectra 400. I used it in a socket 7 Gigabyte motherboard. When that motherboard was killed by a bad PSU I moved it to a super socket 7 IBM desktop I got from work. It was 1999 and they were letting tons of PC's just rot in a wet basement. I was able to talk them out of 2 complete systems. One for me and one for a coworker.

[@ewetzlma]

Love your Videos! Btw, with AM4 you could also double the performance going from a 1800x to a 5800x3d … if not even More than double:)

[@CesarDRK]

I have this exact same board. I’ve installed a k6-2 500 directly in it without any mods or vrm board, it worked fine for my testing for about two hours. It ran at 200mhz if i remember correctly, but worked perfectly.

[@3dfxvoodoocards6]

Very interesting video. Back in 1999 I upgraded my PC from a P166 MMX to a K6-2 400 mhz on the same motherboard, but unfortunately I dont know if it was Socket 7 or Super Socket 7. Anyway the K6-400 mhz was significantly faster than the P166 MMX.

[@lemagreengreen]

Super interesting, I was very much an enthusiast in this era and don't remember seeing one of these in the wild, it was an expensive hobby keeping up with the regular obsolescence of hardware but SS7 and the K6 really seemed to last for a few years for a lot of people. I got stung with yet more obsolescence by jumping head first into Slot A K7 and the fun of AMD ditching it within a couple of years... the price you paid back then. Have to say that BIOS upgrade software is very slick!

[@soniclab-cnc]

I upgraded from a Pentium 133 with MMX to the K6-2 450.... It was a massive upgrade. I was working at a Local PC repair shop at the time and we brought in all the new stuff... I think I had a 32 meg Riva tnt2 and 256 megs of ram. lol what a beast. Played my share of doom 2, HL and quake

[@joetheman74]

There was also a K6-III+ 550 Mhz. The fastest and last of the great Super Socket 7 chips.

[@mstover2809]

I have only seen the K6-2 500 and K6-3 450 myself. Doesn't mean it wasn't made. I stopped caring when the Pentium III came out and I aquired a Dell Optiples with an 1133 MHz CPU. I then got an AMD Athlon XP 2200 on a Socket A motherboard.

[@thomasvennekens4137]

k6-3 still had the same weak fpu . it took an athlon to catch intel

[@joetheman74]

Who cared about catching Intel? It's not a race despite what modern marketing and channels like LTT and GamersNexus and the like would have you believe. The majority of people can not usually afford the top top top CPU's and GPU's anyway as market data supports. Most (over 80% of the market) buys in the mid tier. Back in the day for owners of Super Socket Seven boards these AMD chips were a major boost when you couldn't afford to upgrade to a whole new platform. It helped people extend the life of their existing platforms. Not exactly the market that cared about "Catching Intel."

[@BrassicGamer]

This is such a cool product. I didn't really know what to expect from this at the beginning of the video but, as it went on, I tried to imagine owning such a thing back when it came out. It would have been so exciting! The bundled software with the updated BIOS really is the icing on the cake.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks Andrew! I agree, they turned this into a really slick solution with the included software and BIOS updates, that’s for sure! 👍

[@alexloktionoff6833]

This Evergreen Spectra 400 actually had sense back then, upgrade to super socket 7 was expensive, but usually chipsets were weak so SuperSocket ALI @100FSB had almost same performance as SIS @66MHz bus.

[@josephalbrecht3735]

I just picked up Evergreen Spectra 400 and upgraded my Intel Advanced/ML (Marl) Socket 7 board with it. I had updated the motherboard to MR BIOS a couple years ago. I swapped out the K6-2 for a K6-III+. I used thernal tape to attach heatsink & fan to the CPU. MR BIOS identifies the K6-III+ as a AMD K5 so I used K6INIT and CPUSPEED to enable all the K6-III+ features. It was a such huge performance boost that I put in a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI video card to match. The last time I did something like this was around 2000 with an old Gateway Socket 7 computer. Brought back a lot of memories.

[@vswitchzero]

Nice! Thanks for sharing 🙂

[@Nick_R_]

I still have one of these. I never used it, but maybe one day! My K6-2-450 system is still in use, residing in a case that originally was home to a 386.

[@alexscarbro796]

People might wonder why anyone would make these modifications outside of the Retro Gaming scene, but I can see this being very useful for PC based test equipment from the era, e.g. oscilloscopes.

[@Spazzmoticus]

I love these sorts of socket adapters to enable newer CPUs on older boards. The bios update collection and tool is super impressive as well, I had no idea anyone was doing that back in the day. Personally in my retro Slot 1 PIII system I have a PowerLeap PL-iP3/T and a 1.4ghz Celeron, a huge upgrade over the 400mhz PIII it came with. The bios reports it wrong, but it performs great.

[@SyphistPrime]

Wow, that's actually insane that this was a thing.

[@Sett86]

Thanks for answering a question that has been bugging me for 20 years. Back in high school I had a Pentium in a S7 motherboard that definitely didn't support anything over 166MHz. Well, couple years later I got my hands on a K6-II 233. Not knowing any better I slotted it in as it was, and what do you know it ran. In fact, after a bunch of trial and error, it's ran at 450 MHz (6x75). It handled UT in software like nobody's business. It also needed a massive hunk of aluminum the likes of which has never been seen on socket 7 to keep from liquifying. Having no idea what I'm doing I shorted it not long after that, but running at the default 3,3V it was probably a relief for the poor thing :D

[@PixelRefresh]

Amazing had no idea this was possible. Thanks for sharing this great vid.

[@xsc1000]

I used the similar upgrade set for AMD X5 instead of old 486DX50. It also boosted perormance a lot. With socket 7, I upgraded from Pentium MMX200 to SS7 board FIC VA503 and AMD K6-2/500.

[@sonyericssoner]

So mutch good food in the storage!

[@4A5021]

I just wrapped up installing one of these and scoured the Internet for information on them (and there isn't much.) *Of course* a new info packed video comes out on them a month after I get it working on my own! Anyway, I had the Spectra 400 back in the day. I'd upgraded my P133 using it. I'd also used an older Evergreen board, with an Am5x86 -P75 (something like a 486 DX5 133mhz) to upgrade my old 486SX-33 years before. Being broke back then, these kinds of upgrades were much more economical than the alternative. Fast forward to 2023, I'd purchased a fairly rare DEC PC I thought had a K6-2 200 in it only to discover it was a K5-200, Neat, but not of the era I was aiming for, but then I remembered I had this. My only concern was that the motherboard had no options for adjusting the CPU voltage outside of a replacement VRM, but after a ton of research, it seems I lucked out and the VRM it had was within spec to use the Spectra. Despite being misidentified by the BIOS like yours was, it still works great all these years later. Fun fact: it came with a heatsink and fan (as you mentioned) but no thermal paste or pad, and no mention of it in the install guide. Of course, 2023 me had to put a dot of paste on it.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for your comment and for sharing your experiences with it! That's awesome that you found a K5-200 in that DEC system, that particular speed is incredibly rare and only a small number of 200s were made.

[@spavatch]

This upgradeability makes us feel all warm and fuzzy and wonder what went wrong that it’s no longer possible to rejuvenate an old PC and make it operate closer to current speed standards. Well, when you come to think of it we did still have the option later on, sort of. When I bought my previous PC back in the late noughties it started life as an Athlon64 X2 6400+ (3200 MHz) and served me well through the upgrades right into the 2020s being retired as a Phenom II X6 1100T running at 4200 MHz. That was about quadruple processing power of the original spec, beating i7-3770 of 2012 in rendering tasks by a noticeable margin. Upgrading graphics cards from 3870X2 through 4890, 5870 and dual 7970 all the way up to dual Vega 64s also made it relevant in gaming. And today my current Ryzen 2700X setup also gives some room for improvement, all the way to 16 core 32 thread units, that’s almost 2.5 times the oomph. So unless you went for a laptop or with a bad choice of motherboard you’re not completely stuck with what you got.

[@pandacongolais]

I may be wrong, after all these years, but I think the last time I ran such CPU was on my ASUS P55 T2P4 rev 3.10 (king of OC in +/- 1997 !) + K6-2 or K6-3 / 500 + Voodoo 1 or 2. It ran Unreal Tournament extremely well ! That was more than 20 years ago, I was living in a 36 m2 (square meters, you known, the official international unit !) flat, and I had something like 11 (almost) ready to run systems (not 11 cases for them !). Yes, I was single too ...

[@vswitchzero]

The ASUS T2P4 is an awesome board! I have one but haven’t had a chance to repair it yet. Would love to try a K6-2 in it 👍

[@aaron71]

Great video! Thanks for going in depth with this... I just found one in an old Packard Bell system and wasn't sure exactly how to go about setting it up!

[@vswitchzero]

Very cool! Thanks for watching 🙂👍

[@pazsion]

Wish they kept doing this… Sucks these chip manufacturers nerf themselves… Loved having these chips, that actually work better then the chips they had out. Cyrix eventually built their own. I loved it.

[@yosemite-e2v]

I have one of these that I used to install a K6-3+ 400 into a PCChips M520 VX chipset Socket 7. But that board has a receptacle for a voltage regulator, and I plan on building a Necroware regulator to use instead.

[@inthestudy]

I know I'm a year late on the video, but I think the Quake chart is interesting - the 256kB onboard cache gives about double the benefit on the older board, and even more as a proportion of total frames. The onboard cache is clearly useful when the system is memory-bottlenecked, than when it isn't. Pretty cool upgrade!

[@Indrid__Cold]

Back in the 90s I attended a dinner sponsored by Intel that actually introduced the Overdrive Chip. It was also the first time they would show that commercial that did a fly-through of the inside of a PC . The hair on the back of my neck still stands up whenever I see it.

[@jonjohnson2844]

A reminder that CPU naming used to be even more ambiguous than it is now!

[@madmax2069]

I remember those snap on CPU upgrades for those PCs that had a soldered on CPU, Cyrix made one upgrading the system from a 386 25mhz to 486 running around 40mhz.

[@SobieRobie]

I have been selling Powerleap's adapters back in the days. It wasn"t very popular beacause of the price. It was better for the customer to change whole MB and sell old one. For me as well as I was earning money twice, first selling new mobo, then selling old one to another customer ;) EpoX was king in these days.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for your comment! I wondered that as well - I’m sure the cost of these was high compared to typical CPUs and that a lot of folks weighed it against the cost of a new board/cpu combo.

[@SobieRobie]

​@@vswitchzero I will try to find a price list but this will not happen any soon.

[@SobieRobie]

@@vswitchzero Hi, it wasn't that hard, I found scans of original Powerleap's catalogues and a price list for dealers on my NAS. The pricelist is dated: July 2000. In case you like to check it I can send it to you. Just drop me an email.

[@Obie327]

Very interesting tech! I used earlier intel overdrive chips like the 50/100 486 and then a 586 133 mhz. (this old pc started as a 386 dx 33/40) Pricing was too cost prohibited for the newer Pentium 2/3 and earlier rdram P4's. When pricing did eventually come down I got to play with these earlier machines. Speaking of that earlier 386 build in a IBM style 286 case.. That system ran from 1994 to 2004. Thanks vswitchzero for the wonderfully done look back video!

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks very much 🙂👍

[@Pdor_figlio_di_Kmer]

My very last socket 5 (actually 2 motherboards, one I bricked with a faulty bios upgrade) was a K2 500Mhz. I jumped to Athlon afterwards. Can't remember a lot about it beside the amount of swearing I did at having to buy a new motherboard post-bricking, been a while.

[@rodhester2166]

speaking for 400, I remember ordering a pII 400mhz slot one and it was the fastest you could order, The day I received it I also got a new magazine that showed a 450mhz.. My victory lasted one day.. lol.

[@vswitchzero]

Haha yep! That was the way it was. It was the same with our state of the art Pentium 100 we got. I remember going to the same computer store just a few months later and seeing Pentium 133s all over the place :)

[@dairyb0y]

Interesting that you don’t experiment with 75mhz bus speeds. I did with my Cyrix Socket 7 system and got some nice performance increases. Thanks for the upload, it makes me wish I’d kept some of my old gear.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for your comment! I really would have liked to try 75MHz but the Full Yes board doesn’t have the option. I have one other S7 board that supports it but I haven’t had a chance to repair it yet. Would be great to squeeze some extra performance out of the chip!

[@DevilbyMoonlight]

those old pentiums clock up real easy, I had a p90 running at 133 for years without issues, for the last month I used it it run at 187mhZ which was its max I coud run it stable in an Asus p55t2p4 board. but obviously pale in comparison with the evergreen - the evergreen reminds me a bit from the Amiga days of Accelerator cards to get much more oomph!

[@Stratotank3r]

Never owned such an adapter. Always replaced the Board too. But my SS7 Board is still alive and around. If you can, try the IDT Winchip 200MHz. This thing was designed for such old boards. Good integer but very weak FPU despite MMX Support.

[@vswitchzero]

I actually picked up a 200MHz WinChip recently. Hoping to do a video on it one of these days 👍

[@techdistractions]

Would be interesting to see if this works on one of those budget pc partner boards with 83mhz fsb. With the 6x multiplier you could possibly get something like the k6/3 500 going 😮 Also, that bios can be extended and patched to detect those extra cpus ;-)

[@Guitarhero1000]

Would you please upload more often? I love your videos so much!! Please!!?

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks very much! Haha yeah, I really wish I had more time to work on these. Can be really challenging to balance work and family life with the hobby. Hoping I’ll have more time in the next few months 👍

[@Guitarhero1000]

@@vswitchzero Thanks for the reply. Well. I understand. Im a father and a husband and I work full time. I get it. Love your content!

[@forbiddenera]

I miss old ram that installed like that. You always knew it was clicked in right. Newer style I've had to put a f ton of pressure sometimes to seat em.

[@zxspectrum16KB]

Brilliant video got a socket 7 mobo with l2 cache socket and vrm socket would love to see how hard she can be pushed!

[@rubyvolt]

I have some ASUS SP97-v boards. I got the PowerLeap K62-400 and they rocked back in the day with Win2K and 256MB. Slap in a Promise IDE and lets go!!!

[@waytostoned]

And modding the regular IDE cards to use Raid with a single resistor! Had 4 10gb drives in raid 0. Good times.

[@rubyvolt]

@@waytostoned I put 4 Seagate 20GB in RAID0 all stacked in a tower. Talk about HOT!!! Had to mount them apart. I did the Promise 66 mod to make it RAID. I still have the card.

[@Joshko82]

Awesome video! Mind letting me know which mini keyboard in 3:45 you are using? :)

[@teatimetim]

I work directly with Evergreen as a tech for the state of Michigan to get these working on Dell gx110 optiplex systems to extend the life of those computers through y2k while allowing the state to run out the clock on a bad 3 year Dell contract

[@ahabwolf7580]

I know it probably doesn't matter, just curious if that cooler would be more effective if you rotated the heatsink 90 degrees. That way the fin-stack is more exposed. Great video!

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks very much! I turned it that way so that the air would be channeled more toward the regulators to help keep them cool, but I’m sure it would work well at 90 degrees too.

[@davidcrowder1202]

you deserve 10 times the subs love your vids.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks so much! Means a lot 🙂👍

[@oxfordsparky]

Me and my brother had a Cyrix 486 DX2-66 and my uncle got a Pentium 100 which blew us away, we got a 3DFX card to put in our machine a little later and it was like living in a completely different dimension.

[@TheLionAndTheLamb777]

A relative of mine had a Super Socket 7 Board with128MB PC-100 and I think it was a K6 II @ 600 Mhz. My Mom bought a system with a K6 III 400 that was almost as fast. That L3 cache on the K6 III, and then the K6 II+ and K6 III+ were far superior over the original K6 II even if they were overclocked to the max. Motherboards with 1MB or even 2MB of cache memory existed but most of them had 256K to 512K of cache which really hurt the performance of these processors.

[@jameslewis2635]

I think I had an AMD K6-2 500 back in the day running on a Super socket 7 Soyo branded board (at least I think it was Soyo, the memory is a bit fuzzy going that far back). I think I had it shortly before Diablo was released although I remember still being obosessed with Baldur's Gate II at the time. I was learning computer engineering back then and I noticed that my motherboard supported a 100mhz bus speed so I cranked up the bus speed and dropped the multiplyer to keep the CPU speed within spec and it all worked just fine. I might have got it going at 550Mhz but I can't really remember that well to say for sure. I ran that system for years although I really needed to upgrade when Crysis came out (but back then, who didn't). It was pretty good for Far Cry though and I managed to play through most of Crysis even if it was a bit of a slide-show until I managed to upgrade to a Pentium 4 space heater (one of those upgrades I later came to regret). It was legitimately the first system that I built for myself.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for sharing! I’ve heard a lot of great things about Baldur’s Gate 2 but have never tried it. Will definitely have to give it a shot one of these days. 👍

[@damiendye6623]

These things where quite expensive as well and i decided that it was cheaper to go to slot1 and then overclock the p2 from 400mhz to 533 by using 133mhz fsb and a petal cooler I had friends with genuine ss7 systems.

[@BAB520AZ]

I seriously had a walk-in closet out in the guest house just like that back in the day when i was growing up and living with my parents. i miss that a lot, i remember my first complete build back then had an AMD chip that was 200mhz and back then it was loke a high end gaming rig. That chip was competing against intel early pentiums. I was licky that i plated hockey with a kod who's dad owned a Computer Renaissance so for one of my birthday my dad payed to let me and my buddy build my first computer at his dads atore.

[@rubyvolt]

I had PowerLeap's version of this. Put a K6-2-400 to Pentium I boards. Still have a couple. Need re-cap. The good 'ol days of PC's.

[@pctrashtalk2069]

I had a old Quantex socket 7 system that I upgraded to a AMD cpu. That bios upgrade alone would have been nice to keep it going a while longer. Perhaps someone will reproduce that cpu adapter somehow.

[@knightsun2920]

They were great chips had them in may different systems. One was in a supper socket system but AGP was onboard and no socket.

[@FSK1138]

i remember these .. and AGP 3d video cards were just around the corner

[@AndreiNeacsu]

Great video, congratulations! May I kindly request for a follow up to this video? What I am curious of is setting the FSB S7 to 75 MHz or, even better, 83 MHz and tune the multiplyer accordingly. I would suspect that performance in games using software rendering would be right in the middle between 66 MHz and 100 MHz FSB. The only issue I see is if the 72pin RAM modules can't deal with 83 MHz. In my case, I have an i430TX MB with 2 DIMM slots and 2 or 4 SIMM slots (can't remember right now and it's difficult to access it). My S-S7 uses and Ali Aladdin 5 chipset and does really well with PC-100 DIMMs. Unfortunately, I have no upgrade interposers for the S7 MB and can't do a proper comparison.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks very much! Most of my S7 boards are older and don’t support 75/83MHz but I do have an ASUS T2P4 430HX that needs to be repaired. I believe it should support it if I can get it going again. Hopefully 50ns EDO can handle 75MHz. Great idea for a follow-up 👍

[@JazzTechie]

I miss powerleap. Upgraded an old slot 1 to a 1.4 ghz CPU. I may still have it downstairs.

[@Pholiage]

Seems you can make your own adapters now. pcbway has them in their user submits

[@shaun4bigblocks993]

I watched this back when you released it and I am watching it again. I really want to try one of these on my Voodoo 1/S3 Virge Triton FX Socket 5 MB in place of the 200MMX OD I have ran on it for over 20 years. These seem like they are never available when ever I think to look for them and until this video I never realized the Evergreen included MMX & 3Dnow. Hey, would you mind telling me what keyboard you are using and if it is USB or PS2?

[@sydres]

I remember OfficeMax selling an evergreen upgrade with a pr266-mmx cyrix. For the money i ended up buying a new board and a 233 pentium mmx.

[@crbielert]

I feel like this would be an easy product to produce new if there are issues with getting a hold of one today

[@cyrillebournival2328]

From what I remember the 2000's were the years of the pentium 4. It's amazing how these chips had to be profitable against the pentium, pentium II, pentium III and pentium 4 all at the same time not mentioning AMD itself and Cyrix and the others.

[@JohnSmith-iu8cj]

Good stuff!

[@Canthus13]

AMD used the slot based setup like the PII with the initial Athlon. It was basically a backward Slot 1. It didn't last, though. They went to Socket A pretty quickly though, because slots were a stupid idea.

[@Shaner9er]

i wish i could find one of these to play around with on my packard bell, dont get me wrong the mmx 233 is great but if i could make it 400 that would be pretty awesome.

[@noanyobiseniss7462]

I had a Evergreen 286 on my 8088.

[@MrGoneja]

Be interesting to put a k6-3(3+) 450 to see if the extra cache makes a difference. Could be the ultimate socket 5. Crystal swap could get a little extra speed too

[@tofuguru941]

Would it be able to recognize a k6 III+? Most motherboards see the III+ as a plain III, but you still see the full 256kb cache and get the benefits from it.

[@vswitchzero]

Thanks for your comment! I don’t have a III+ to try but since the architecture is pretty much the same as the II+ but with half the cache, I expect it would indeed work fine 👍

[@Jerkwad152]

It's funny that a Socket 7 BIOS even has a 486DX listed 🤣

[@bikkiikun]

While you're at it with the '+' models, what about the K6-III+??

[@vswitchzero]

Don't have a K6-III+ in my collection yet. Hopefully one of these days :)

[@Bunker278]

I went straight from S7 to S370 via Dual Celeron 366s overclocked to 550MHz in a BP6. My S7 machine was too specialized for any other upgrade path.

[@vswitchzero]

The BP6 was an awesome board. Had one for a while too 🙂

[@jeremiahmiller6431]

I once came across a system I sorely wish I had not parted out at the time. It was a Packard Bell in a tower format, early Socket 7, that I believe came with a P133 processor originally. But some madmad had got ahold of that machine... It had one of these Spectra 400 processors, 64 mb of EDO DRAM, an original TNT graphic card, an AWE64, Intel 100baseTX network card, and a secondary generic ATA controller to support the 20gb hard drive. Throw in a slow DVD+RW, wrap it back up in the original case, and it was this tiny little sleeper of a Packard Bell. Like a dumbass, I parted it out.

[@roadi7]

I still have one of them