Thinkpads Forum

Hi Everybody!
Congratulations for this great forum you have here!
To my question:

I had a TP 600e and wanted to upgrade it to P III. There a lots of very good instructions to do it. But now I bought a 600X one with a PIII 500, but unluckyly one without Speedstep-Mainboard.

Cant I get the full speed of the 750Mhz PIII I bought for this machine by destroying the Speedstep on the CPU like it is described for the 600E Upgrade?!
I want to have the full power of 750Mhz and no problems while starting the machine! I guess my 600X with the 750Mhz cpu needs now longer to start WinXP, as it needed with the old 500Mhz cpu in it!!! And I have these problems, that it crashes while booting if the battery isnt full loaded!!!

Thanx a lot for your answers and nice greetings from Germany!

wollvieh wrote: Cant I get the full speed of the 750Mhz PIII I bought for this machine by destroying the Speedstep on the CPU like it is described for the 600E Upgrade?!

Yes! FYI My second 600X was born with a 500mhz cpu and when i upgrade it to 650mhz the laptop supported the speedstep cpu perfectly, the speedstep workrd perfectly. 500mhz on battery and 650mhz on ac power.

Strange, do you have the "latest" BIOS installed?

Yes, newest Bios is installed.

cmarti wrote:My second 600X was born with a 500mhz cpu and when i upgrade it to 650mhz the laptop supported the speedstep cpu perfectly, the speedstep workrd perfectly. 500mhz on battery and 650mhz on ac power.

That's not been everyone's experience when upgrading the CPU on a 500Mhz 600X machine. There are a variety of theories about why some machines seem to work while others don't, but no one seems to have pinned down an answer that explains all cases. My own theory is that some people have been lucky and happen to have machines that had motherboards installed that support SpeedStep, while others are using Windows 2000 and are actually experiencing CPU throttling that is built into Win2000 not speed "stepping" as a result of SpeedStep functions. Regardless, I don't know if anyone can provide a definitive answer: the only way to be 100% sure is to install a SpeedStep CPU and test it out.

There has been considerably less work done on CPU modding with the 600X models than with the 600E models. Having said that, however, my understanding is that the 600E SpeedStep hack (the one that causes the CPU to start up in "high" speed) is performed on the MMC-2 board and not on the motherboard, so I don't see why it wouldn't work with a non-SpeedStep-enabled 600X -- in conjunction with the DeepSleep utility (which hasn't been fully tested on the 600X platform yet either). But I've never tried it, nor have I actually seen confirmation that this hack will work with the 500MHz 600X models.

And of course, if you haven't already, you might want to start wading through the epic CPU upgrade thread over on Wim's BIOS:
IBM Thinkpad 600E bios mod for processor update.

Phil.

wollvieh wrote:And I have these problems, that it crashes while booting if the battery isnt full loaded!!!

I'm not familiar with that problem, but that sounds strange. Have you got a different battery you can test it out with? Maybe your battery is gone/going dead?

Phil.

Yes, my accu is an old one. I rebuilt my PIII 500 into the 600X.
Thanx a lot guys for the help. I will sell my 600E and 600X in the next time.
But now I bought a T40 at ebay and there are new problems....
I have no soundchip or it is destroyed....
But I started a new topic in the T4X forum. Maybe we can solve my problem