P3-550/Abit BE6 upgrade

[Mojak]

I have a P3-550 and Abit board (BE6), i want to upgrade the memory to (SDRAM)512MB-PC-133 and hard disk to 40G UDMA-100 7200. Will it work, i know the drive is only udma-66.

I know it will not work to its full capabilities but will it be useable under the said circumstances.

 

[JohnS9051]

Yes this will work okay.
The memory will run at 100MHz and the hard drive will run at 66.6MBps as long as you use a 40-pin, 80-conductor (ATA-66/100) cable.
Otherwise, with a standard 40-pin IDE cable the hard drive will only run at 33.3MBps.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

John

 

[JohnS9051]

One more thing it forgot. If you have an older version motherboard you may also need to update the BIOS to support the 40GB hard drive.
See Abit's website:

http://www.abit-usa.com/eng/download/bios/bios-be6.htm

Hope this helps. Good luck.

John

 

[paparazi]

It's worth a note that transfer rates on the IDE bus max below the ATA 66 level at the mo! just other bottle necks in the system, so although you are not taking advantage of the UDMA 100 speed you won't notice the differance untill boards come out with a faster rate. Martin

 

[Psychosylph]

Or you could throw in a controller card for the hard drive, get a little extra cooling and crank up the Front Side Bus to start using some of that extra performance; but, then again, I'm just a psycho... (and I love those boards)