CPU Upgrade the Easy Way

You can breathe new life into an antiquated Pentium desktop system in many ways--including turning it into a doorstop, or a hand-me-down for the kids. But if upgrading the system you've spent so much time getting "just right" is more appealing than buying a new one and taking months to tweak it to perfection, Evergreen Technologies has an incredibly easy, if a bit pricey, way to do that: the AcceleraPCI.

The aptly named AcceleraPCI is a PCI card with a socket for a 370-pin Celeron CPU, an Intel ZX chipset, and two small outline DIMM slots. (SODIMMs are more compact and easier to fit in tight spaces.) The card comes in several flavors with different combinations of processor speed and memory (we looked at the $399 AcceleraPCI 466/64). You can use the card to upgrade a computer based on an Intel Pentium, AMD K5 or K6, Cyrix 6x86, or IBM 6x86 chip. We plugged the card into a Pentium MMX-200 system and got impressive results.

Alas, the AcceleraPCI can't make use of the memory on your old motherboard, and the card won't work in every system. To see if your system is compatible, download and run Evergreen's PreQual diagnostic program from the company's Web site.

Quick Acceleration

Installing the AcceleraPCI 466/64, which comes equipped with a Celeron-466 processor and 64MB of SDRAM, was as easy as opening the case, inserting the card into an open PCI slot, and turning the system on.

The AcceleraPCI doesn't take over until the system BIOS and any BIOS on an add-on card have finished setting up (using the old CPU), so system boot time will be a bit longer with the upgrade (boot time was about 10 seconds on our test PC). When the AcceleraPCI's BIOS screen finally pops up, you're offered the chance to enter the card's setup program by pressing F1. The program lets you turn off the AcceleraPCI; it also allows you to adjust settings such as the Front Side Bus speed, the CPU clock multiplier, and the CPU core voltage, so you can upgrade the AcceleraPCI's processor at a later date. Most users shouldn't touch the default settings, however.

Windows 98 immediately recognized the AcceleraPCI as a new piece of hardware in our test system, and after a brief session installing the drivers (supplied by Evergreen on a floppy disk, along with Windows NT and 2000 drivers), we were up and running--faster than before.