Anyone have experience with POWERLEAP?

[gunf1ghter]

I am thinking of buying the Socket 370 powerleap to upgrade the CPU on my brothers Abit BH6 (he is running an overclocked celery 300a now).. The powerleap should allow (per their website) his board to take a FC-PPGA Celeron 1 gig chip (with 256K cache).

I have read a few weird usenet posts where people report that they had some problems running applications though with the powerleap mod...

Can anyone here report their results as far as system stability goes? Also is the custom heatsink that comes with the powerleap sufficient to cool a 1 gig celeron?

 

[boyRacer]

You mean the neo converter or something right? Yah it should work... check out BP6.com... they're still trying to make a P3 coppermine work on the board... and this is the converter theyre using.

 

[gunf1ghter]

here's the thing I'm talking about.

Powerleap

According to them it will make any socket 370 mobo work with a coppermine P3 cpu.

 

[boyRacer]

Isnt a BH6 a slot 1 motherboard? What you really want is this right?

 

[gunf1ghter]

no, I guess it's teh BA6 he has... it's def socket 370

 

[apoppin]

I have a 1.2Ghz Tualatin Celeron on my Abit BX-6(r.2) with a PL adapter. Their included H/S Fan is plenty for cooling the CPU . . .

Works fine . . . completely stable (as Win98SE can be).



PL's tech support leaves much to be desired.

EDIT: My suggestion would be to buy it and then take advantage of their 30-day money-back guarantee if you are not happy.

 

[Jeff H]

FWIW I just put a Powerleap iP3T in a rev1.02 BH6 and after we figured out an old i740 video card was giving us problems (swapped it out for a GForce2 Pro) the BH6 is now cooking @ 1.2GHz. A nice upgrade for my brother in law who didn't want to scrap his system right now for a new one.

 

[gunf1ghter]

Cool.... well, I opted instead to just get a new mobo and 1.6A Northwood. My brother is inheriting my 1.33 Tbird rig.

 

[techwanabe]

<< Cool.... well, I opted instead to just get a new mobo and 1.6A Northwood. My brother is inheriting my 1.33 Tbird rig. >>



That was probably a smart move. Some less expensive mobo's coast the same as a PL. I've always wondered why there would be a market for such a thing when you can get a new/updated motherboard to put your shiny new CPU on for about the same cost, or a little more.

 

[Jeff H]

I'll give you guys one reason why somone would go the Powerleap route, rather than a new mobo/cpu combo. There are some, like my brother in law and his wife that do not want to go through a rebuild, but would rather spend a few $$ more and increase their performance w/ little hassle. They have a lot of apps and tweaks/customizations that they'd just as soon not have to redo. They get no pleasure from rebuilding and tweaking a system - to them it's simply a tool.

What I've observed from their upgrade (which I already more or less knew) is that every so often a motherboard comes along that truly sets a new standard, for its time. The Abit BH6 is one of those boards, IMO. We put in a new 40GB Seagate Barracuda IV hard drive (virtually silent), a Promise UtraATA100 card, a Powerleap iP3T, and a Leadtek GeForce2 Pro video card. W/o having to do a reload of the OS and all the apps (Ghosted the old drive over) they were up and running in a matter of a few hours. No muss, no fuss <g>. Their plans are to run this system for a while longer, then get a new one and keep this one as a second machine for their kids (two daughters, no games to speak of).

 

[HO]

I agree with all that and I'll add this: the BX chipset not only set a standard for its time, it's still competitive today. When it's overclocked to 133 it offers great STABLE performance that I have come to depend on. I'm thinking that I can run this board (BM6) for at least another year. I've never gotten that kind of life out of any other mobo and probably never will again. Hail Abit and Powerleap!

 

[Witchfinder]

From what I can gather, the powerleap adapter costs more to the UK than a perfectly servicable Tualatin motherboard (which is £50) and the advantage of buying the motherboard is that you get 4 USB ports, superb OC functions, ATA100 and a load of other modern amenaties as well as a guarantee that it`ll all work with all CPUs - don`t get me wrong, I love the BX chipset, my server is still running one but there are times when updating old things with Kludges just aren`t cost efficient..

Just an alternative view

 

[JamesDax42]

I also just installed the PowerLeap PL-iP3/T 1.2Ghz Celeron(Tualatin) and I've been very happy with the upgrade. The setup I have now should be good for atleast another year. Then I'll worry about building/buying a new system.

 

[Vadatajs]

I have one on my abit sh6 and it works fine. Every time it posts it says the cpu is unworkable or has been changed, but when I hit F1 to continue, the computer boots fine into windows and wcpuid reports the proper speed.

 

[Jeff H]

Vadatajs, in the SH6 BIOS setup (CPU Soft Menu II or III) did you disable Speed Error Hold? If not that's the reason you're getting the unworkable designation.

 

[Ewu]

I also have a powerleap 1.2 ghz running on a Abit BX6 R2. So far it works rock-stable in Win98Se, Win2k, WinXP and Red Hat Linux 7.2 on my quad-booting system. In addition, I just barely got it to fit in my Inwin A660 (same as the A500) with 2 cm to spare, after removing the power supply and taking out one of my slot retention brackets and then re-inserting everything back in.