Intel Pentium II OverDrive

The first thing you need to do, before wondering about what to do with your old Pentium Pro processor after you've upgraded it, is to make sure that your system can accept the Pentium II OverDrive. For starters, you must have a Socket-8 motherboard, all previous Pentium Pro motherboards including those without ZIF (Zero Insertion Force) sockets will not accept the Pentium II OverDrive, the easiest way to tell if you have a Socket-8 motherboard is to first consult your manual or look at the socket itself, it should say Socket-8 on it.

The second item to take into consideration is BIOS support for the Pentium II OverDrive, very few mainboard manufacturers that made Pentium Pro motherboards ever followed up with the introduction of the Pentium II OverDrive with a BIOS update. AnandTech's tests used an Octek Rhino P6 Pro Pentium Pro motherboard that did support the Pentium II OverDrive processor, however in the case of many motherboards, the upgrade will either go undetected or improperly detected, often resulting in only 1/2 of the L2 cache being enabled. Your best bet is to take the issue up with your mainboard manufacturer, however you must be sure before slapping down the cash to buy this costly little upgrade as returning an item such as an OverDrive processor isn't always the easiest thing to do, especially when dealing with online vendors.

Owners of multiprocessor Pentium Pro systems will be faced with a bit of a more complex decision to make, the Pentium II OverDrive processor is certified for use in up to dual processor configurations. If you happen to have a dual processor system, you can upgrade it using two Pentium II OverDrive processors, or you can use a single OverDrive without a companion (you cannot pair an OverDrive and a regular Pentium Pro). At the same time, this means that quad processor Pentium II OverDrive setups are not certified for operation and may not work. At the time of publication AnandTech did not have a quad processor Pentium Pro motherboard for verification of any problems with the chip in 4-way multiprocessor configurations.

AnandTech's original Pentium Pro system consisted of a Pentium Pro 180, with 256KB of L2 cache running at 180MHz, on an Octek Rhino P6 Pro Socket-8 motherboard based on the Intel 440FX Natoma Chipset, a 4MB PCI Matrox Millennium II, a PCI Ethernet adapter, an ISA Sound Blaster 16, and 2 - 32MB 60ns EDO SIMMs for a total of 64MB of RAM. A few years ago an identically configured system could have been considered top-notch, however in today's market, AnandTech's system was in desperate need of an upgrade.

The installation of the Pentium II OverDrive consisted of nothing more than removing the Pentium Pro 180, and replacing it with the upgrade. The processor itself came with a quick installation pamphlet that basically diagramed the same simple installation process. The heatsink/fan combo on the Pentium II OverDrive is a very quiet unit and performs an adequate job of cooling the already cool running 0.25-micron processor, the fan is powered by a 5-pin hard drive pass-through power connector.