| Author |
Message |
Brandon Idell
| | Posted on Sunday, September 26, 1999 - 3:23 pm: | |
Can anybody tell me if a 386SX can be upgraded to a 486 66MHz or faster and if it would accept todays hardrives. |
tom
| | Posted on Sunday, September 26, 1999 - 3:23 pm: | |
In reference to converting a 386X to a 486X....
Plain and simply "YES" if your willing to make
change's to the MB and know what your doing. /&/
you can run a most any HD you want, you wont get
the performance, but you can run it. |
Noel
| | Posted on Sunday, September 26, 1999 - 3:23 pm: | |
You may also find that the BIOS on the motherboard will not support drives over 540mb. It's not PnP like todays boards either when it comes to the CPU. As Tom has said you will need to re-jumper the board for chipset and bus speed. Depending on the board you may find that this is not possible. I'd be looking at selling the SX in it's case for a few dollars and buying a DX266 in a case for a few dollars more. Shouldn't really cost you too much and it will save you heaps of possibly frustrating time messing around |
Dave
| | Posted on Sunday, September 26, 1999 - 3:23 pm: | |
Only if the motherboard has a separate socket on it
that will accept a 486DX CPU. Some of the later 386's
had such a socket (I have a couple of them), but
they most likely would have come with a 386 DX33 or DX40
originally. The 386 SX motherboards were early models;
any such board is unlikely to support a 486 of any kind.
At the very least, if it's possible, you should upgrade
to a 386DX 40 CPU and try to scrounge up a math coprocessor,
again, if the board will support it. Here in the States,
486 boards and processors are dirt cheap now, so I'd
just look for a 486 board and processor. As for hard
drives, as long as you have an IDE controller card
installed, any IDE drive, including the present day
monsters, will function quite nicely, though not at
their rated speed. And you will have to use a disk
configuration utility (downloadable from your hard
drive manufacturer) in order to take advantage of
drives larger than 504 MB under Dos 6.22, and 2 GB
under Win95 or Win95a. Of course, you won't be able to
run 95 without at least a 386 DX40 and 16MB RAM. Hope
this helps, and good luck. |
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