Thinkpads Forum

I am trying my hand at this. I had another member make the cpu exchange for me. When it arrives I will install it and see what the results are. I am getting rid of all me 600x parts, but I wanted to keep one at maximum speed. I will keep you informed.
cheers,
glenn

I'd be interested in hearing how this goes. I've only seen references to a 1GHz CPU in a 600X via some serious modding. Keep us posted.

Phil.

I am very interested! Who was the forum member that did the modifying? Want another one to do?

I modified am MMC2 module with a 1GHz CPU a couple of years ago. It does work, but I ran into two problems.

First, speedstep on the 600X seems to be unreliable. It has a tendency to get stuck in low power mode if conditions aren't just right when it boots (AC power and a charged battery). Also, it tends to occasionally freeze for about 1 second when changing speeds on the fly. When on battery, it will often lock up completely when switching speeds. I noticed this same problem with two motherboards, even when using an unmodified CPU, so I don't think it's a problem with my CPU upgrade. In the end, I found a third party speedstep utility and set it to always run at full speed on AC, and always at low speed on battery. This was with XP.

The other problem I had was that when installing Windows XP, it didn't seem to want to run the fan during the blue/DOS part of setup. Eventually, it would shut off due to thermal protection. As a workaround, I started setup on battery so that it would stick in low power mode, and I aimed a small fan to suck air through the CPU fan vents. Once XP is installed, the fan works fine (although still a little hot). I did add some extra cooling fins inside the CPU fan to try to improve cooling.

Any updates?

was going to try this as well but never went for it. I heard someplace a few panasonic toughbooks were made with a rare mmc2 1ghz that was custom made for them. Don't know if this is true or not. I was looking a while back and never found one

I ended up buying a dell that had an 850 mmc2 cpu I salvaged out of it, and that is as fast as I got my 600x up to. Was an easy upgrade.

kenzking wrote:I heard someplace a few panasonic toughbooks were made with a rare mmc2 1ghz that was custom made for them. Don't know if this is true or not.

My recollection is that these 1GHz MMC-2 cards were custom-built specifically for that specific Toughbook model, and that they had a slightly different height or board shape or something, which would mean that you couldn't just drop them in to a 600X even if you found one. I never saw one in person so, and my memory may be wrong...

[Later:] Also, you might want to check out this example of someone replacing the actual CPU:
CPU upgrade on mmc2 board?

Phil.

I am on my 600x right now (had to boot it up to use a scanner only compatible with win XP)... Thanks for the link pkiff... I had google chrome translate it to English and its pretty interesting read. I understand soldering a new cpu on the mmc board is quite involved, and that using a heat gun to solder and re solder the new chip is the easiest way. I think that you need to "reball" the CPU, which means that each of the hundreds of pins needs a tiny bit of solder applied to it first....
I'm not going to jump into that project, sounds way too involved for me.

To be honest the 850mhz is quite a bit jump in performance; that was +350mhz for me. I don't think that an extra 150mhz is going to do very much more. The reason I don't use the 600x more often is because it doesn't have a hardware accelerated graphics card. That is the reason that it cant play back video at a fast frame rate. When I switched it to the 850mhz cpu it made quite a big improvement over the 500mhz, but I cant see another 150mhz really helping much.

I would recommend to just go the 850mhz route over spending all the time and money to make it a 1gig.... But on the other hand, how neat is it to have a 1ghz 600x? That would be pretty cool and maybe that make it worth it in itself?

sounds like a business oppertunity for somebody with a bit of spare time.

I've seen someone do it before on a 600x, google it i think its on page 3, someone found a pga-mmc2 adapter with jumpers on it, it screwed up some setting i don't remember. I think it would be harder, but less expensive to buy some 500mhz cartridges and resolder/reball 1ghz cpu's onto them.

Sounds like some extra ebay money in spare time, I couldn't see a buisness out of it unless you specifically made new mmc2 cartridges with your own cpu, since the piii is still patented(i think).