Thinkpads Forum

Hi, first posting - it's cool there is a forum for the thinkpad faithful. I just bought my second TP - a 390E I got for just over $60 on eBay - a steal. I bought it because i couldn't play Red Alert on my 755c - no sound. Anyhow, now I have the 390E i can play Red Alert and Red Alert 2! But still i want more! I put an mmc-2 pentium ii 366mhz cpu in to replace the stock 300 mhz chip, I know you can get a 400mhz p2 that will definitly work- my question is this - could i put a 500mhz+ p3 or celeron in this machine? would there be problems with bus speeds etc? I really want the extra power so i can play Half-Life and Quake 2 on this machine without relying on the lame-[censored] neomagic video card for my 3D acceleration. Any input will be gratefully accepted. Thinkpads ROCK!!!! (just in case you are thinking i should just buy a more powerful PC if I want to play these games I do have a loaded IBM P4 desktop for HL 2, doom 3 etc - I just want to be able to play Half life one in bed!)

If your computer uses the MMC2 interface, it should be possible though I'm not sure how well your 390 would take it.

My ThinkPad 600E used to hve a PII 366 in it until I upgraded it by installing a PIII 750 MMC2 module. Since my computer doesn't support speedstep, the CPU runs at 600mhz instead of 750 and I had to hack the BIOS to disable the L2 cache and use a Windows software to re-enable it when I log in in order to avoid an error message at boot since the 600E's BIOS doesn't seem to be able to handle the L2 in a PIII. Other than that, everything works great, my computer is much faster and the PIII chip actually seems to run slightly cooler than the old PII chip did.

The major concern I would have is with the onboard RAM. Some people get lucky and the onboard RAM is able to work on the faster 100mhz bus speed set by the PIII but some people end up having to disable that RAM.

a little off topic to the original thread, but do you think the 570e (p3 500) could be upgraded to a higher clocked p3?

stupid question above... realized that 570e cpus are soldered onto the board