Clever Motherboard Hack Brings Late 90’s Motherboard Into the Early 2000’s

Some people look at specifications as a requirement, and others look at them as a challenge. You’re reading this on Hackaday, so you know where [Necroware] falls. In the video below the break, you’ll see how he takes a common mid-to-late 90’s motherboard and takes it well past its spec sheet.

[Necroware] does what all soldering iron ads think people do with soldering irons

Having already started with replacing the Real Time Clock with his own creation, [Necroware] looked for other opportunities to make the Asus P/I-P55TP4XEG more capable than Asus did. And, he succeeded. Realizing that the motherboard has the ability to have an external voltage regulator board, [Necroware] made one so that the Socket 7 board could supply more than a single voltage to the CPU- the very thing keeping him from upgrading from a Pentium 133 to a Pentium MMX 200.

While the upgrade was partially successful, a deep dive into the Socket 7 and Super Socket 7 documentation helped him realize the need for a pullup resistor on a strategic clocking pin. Then, [Necroware] went full Turbo and smashed this author’s favorite single core CPU of all time into the socket: the AMD K6-2 450, a CPU well beyond the original capabilities of the board.

It really goes to show that, of course, It’s All About The Pentiums. Thanks to [BaldPower] for the doing the needful and dropping this great hack into the Tip Line!