IPC Powernote G795 with K6-3+?!

[moondog]

Hello together,

I´ve shoot a quite rare laptop on Ebay lately, the mentioned Powernote by IPC. It is a Powernote500, that means it was equipped with a K6-2 500. As it features a 14,1" display I´m going to replace my odd P3 notebook with it, just because it is a lot freakier

The first crazy thing I found out is that it seem to handle 512MB SDRAMs, I just put the 512MB PC133 of my old lappy into it and he booted with gorgeous 578 MB RAM... so I will try to put another 512er into the second bank... It seems as it is equipped with any ALI Aladdin 5 chipset and I wonder if it can handle 1 GB of ram then? If he can handle this amount of memory I urgently need to get a K6-3+ to run on it... I could put in my normal K6-3 but it´s an AHX At the moment it boots my ATZ with 500 Mhz but as K5 so I don´t know if it will handle it right... the Vcore can be lowered to 1,8 Volt, so it would fit very well...

I´ve already flashed the latest known BIOS I found on a russian ftp-server but he can´t handle the K6-3+ So I wonder if there is anyone who could patch the bios in this way, perhaps enabling bigger harddisks too... please help! This would be an ace machine if I could build it up as I wanted to do...

Thanx in advance,

Eric

[Jim]

Jan Steunebrink could do the bios. What you should do is go to his site, and see if there is ANY bios available for whatever Mobo is in the thing that will support a K6+.

[moondog]

Hi Jim,

I already wrote to Jan Steunebrink and I hope he´s still doing patches. On his page there is not board like this one listed. It seems that it is an Alphatop G795 revision 2.1, interestingly a sticker aside of the BIOS chip tell´s me that the board features a Phoenix Pentium 2 Special A BIOS...

So far I could check that it may already support bigger harddisks as it found my 80 GB disk already and tried to boot from it, unfortunately it seems that I have to reinstall XP completely as the BIOS isn´t ACPI compliant and XP always hangs with a bluescreen. The XP installation furthermore shows me the whole diskspace of the harddisk, so I guess it should run without any problems.

At next, while booting the BIOS found the L2 cache of the CPU and tells me, that 512 KB L3 Cache SRAM are installed, so it may support K6-3 CPU´s already. The problem is that the voltage regulator may give the wrong Vcore to the CPU?! Even though I have switched to 1,8 Volt the cooling block was going that hot while trying to install XP that I couldn´t hold my fingers on it anymore in the end... so I stopped my examination as I don´t want to burn off my ATZ... So a question about this: can it be that the board gives the wrong voltage to a CPU that can´t be recognized right by the BIOS, even if I have set a special voltage by dipswitches?

I´m quite uncertain atm and I wonder if I should give my K6-3 AHX a try then. The problem is that the board doesn´t features a real socket and you have to drag on the corners of the cpu to get it out of the socket again, I don´t want to damage this thing while exchanging the CPU´s again and again...

That´s it for now, I will try some other voltages and maybe underclock the CPU a bit, maybe it lowers the heat a bit... I want to see this fucking ace baby up and running

Greetings,

Eric

PS... Since I didn´t matched it to run the ATZ cooler I finally put in my AHX and the BIOS is able to recognize him correctly! But so far I always get a bluescreen while trying to install XP with different error messages. I already pressed F7 for non-ACPI, but there seem to be another problem. The thing that makes me crazy is that the cooling fan only runs at start and then he slows down and finally completely stops and doesn´t start again, even if the cooling block is already cooking

PSSS... and another little update, I guess the machine freezes as it runs much too hot. I depends not on the cooling fan itself, he slows down even if I cut the yellow cable that controls the fan speed... maybe there is something wrong with the temperatur sensor or something. I could kick my ass as I didn´t saved the old bios - would be interesting to know if this happened already using the old bios. Unfortunately both Bios weren´t displaying the voltage and fan speed... yawn... as undervolting the normal K6-3 wont run right, even if I switched him down to 200 Mhz, I did the same with the K6-2 500 - and tried to install XP then. Here I checked that the harddisk limit lays at 60 gb or something - damn, damn, damn... so at least I know were the problems with the blue screens came before. The XP installing routine runs well on a smaller HDD... unfortunately it is awfully slow while the cpu is cooking more and more. So I stopped my examination for today. Seems this little goodie needs some more time to be checked out...

[jsc1973]

Any luck with this? I know when Jan Steunebrink was doing those custom BIOSes, he often removed the artificial BIOS limitations on hard disk sizes at the same time he added K6-2+ and K6-III+ to the CPU tables. There's no reason that machine can't support a drive of up to 137 GB, if it can support one of 60.

Finding a K6-based laptop that can take more RAM is really a find. I located a Compaq Presario 1247 last year, which is stuck on a 66 MHz bus, but which also uses a very old OPTi chipset that recognizes 256 MB RAM sticks, something most K6-based Presarios won't do. Even though it's stuck at 400 MHz (6*66.6), it's faster than some other models that I have running at 550 MHz, thanks to having more than twice as much RAM.

Good luck.

[moondog]

Hi,

unfortunately the Lappy wont support 512 MB RAM sticks really, I don´t get XP installed with such sticks. So I tried with the original 64 MB stick only and I had success... building in the 512 MB stick I don´t get XP to boot correctly, just one time I reached the desktop in save-mode, but finally I always got bluescreens, seems he can´t handle the big sticks really. Will try with 2 256 MB sticks next.

Even tough he don´t recognizes the K6-3+ really he runs well with it, XP shows me 601 Mhz

I wrote Jan Steunebrink but don´t got e reply so far, maybe he isn´t doing that stuff anymore? So far I didn´t got my 80 GB HDD to run correctly, XP always crashes while running the installation routine...

Furthermore I found out that he supports K6-3 originally (tried with my 400 AHX) and the max FSB is 100 Mhz

Greetings,

Eric

[moondog]

Cleaning out the dust from this thread just to mention that I finally got the machine to run with 512 MB RAM (2x 256 sticks) - the former problems occured since the sticks got no right contact to the slots as they were to big for the small place and I tried them not completely pushed in... after some reworks of the shielding around the sticks fit well and can be pushed completely into the slots and the machine runs well now with the whole ammount of RAM

Greetings,

Eric