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| Technical News Association |
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| #2 |
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| 486 Upgrades |
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| Author: Christopher Barr |
| Typed By: Oreo |
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Ultimate Upgrade
That Baby-Blue ZIF socket you may have seen sprouting like
mushrooms on 486-based systems boards lately is Intel's latest effort
at standardizing the upgrade market. But whether you can upgrade your
system to a Pentium-like CPU may depend up on which blue socket you
get.
Intel, which pioneered the why-sell-one-CPU-to-a-customer-
when-you-can-sell-two? strategy, developed a kitchen-sink socket that
system makers can install on system boards. This 238-pin baby-blue
socket will accept DX2 and OverDrive chips (which are the same
internally), as well as a derivative 32-bit bus version of the Pentium
(code named P24T), which won't be available until early 1994. A full
64-bit bus Pentium system requires a system board overhaul.
Intel will actually promote two different blue upgrade
sockets. A 169-pin version is designed for 486SX-and DX-based systems
and can't accept the P24T, while the 238-pin version is for DX2
systems and can take the P24T, but system manufactures don't always
follow this rule. Zeos International, for example, is shipping the
238-pin socket in its entire line of desktop systems, from the 486SX-
25 to the 486DX2-66, and is staying away entirely from the 169-pin
version.
As long as system makers design the memory subsystems to
support the Pentium, there's no reason why most systems would not be
able to use the 238-pin socket. While we commend Intel for making
upgrading easier, why couldn't the company simply color-code the
sockets for us? Make the blue socket for the OverDrive, and the
purple socket for Pentium. Is that too difficult?
Copied from:
Christopher Barr's article in the January 26, 1993 Edition of
"PcMagazine" .
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