IBM Thinkpad 600E bios mod for processor update

Thanks for the memory info. I just purchased two of the known good Kingston's on ebay for $49 USD each, so I will have 512M!. They are used, but supposed to be tested, and the best price for a single new Kingston was over $100. Looking forward to finally getting this working. I really need it for school.

Once I get the memory working and laptop booting, should I be able to use one of the previously listed mods to bump up the reported speed of my processor from 500mhz to somewhere close to my module's 600mhz rating or is it actually running at 600mhz, but just reported at 500mhz in the bios?

Should I trust the speed the bios is reporting or is that the highest the PII bios will report?

Thanks

I just discovered a problem with my 600e PIII upgrade..

I recently purchased a new hard drive. The old drive was getting noisy. I figured the bearings were starting to go.
No problems with the old drive otherwise, but I figured it was over 5 years old and time to get a new one.

So I decided to do a clean install of the latest Arch Linux from CD on to the new drive. The install failed during the package installation stage. I get a "bus error" message from the kernel.

Hmmm. So I decide to run the 600e BIOS memory test.
It locked up during the test.

So it looks like my system is not stable with the 108 fsb mod.

What is funny is that it would boot & run the old harddrive drive without any noticable problems.

So next weekend I am going to try some of the slower fsb speeds or go back to 66mhz. I think the other alternatives are 71 & 105mhz?

I did try to disable the onboard memory in the bios editor but it did not work. I still saw the same memory size when I rebooted.

If you only see 292mb then it might be that you do not have the latest BIOS that allows 512 DIMMS.

I think it is version INET36W that you need. But you need to go to IBM's website and enter your model number to be sure. I think there are two flavors of 600e BIOS's based off of the model number.

You can load the BIOS from floppy if you have one for your 600e. Otherwise you need to make a bootable CD from the BIOS floppy image (which is what I did).

he,he, i'm running 810mghz(108fsb)now,successfully modded the p3 750 cpu, after carefull assesment of the revised circuitry i procceeded in very similar manner to sharedocs methods with the 600-700 type cpus,where as the 750-850 types seem
to have relocated some resistors,good news is we can now mod the later 750-850 cpus too,as they have different ciucuitry to the 600-700 cpus.
making 1ghz a reality if one uses a turbo pll like sharedoc does.
my thinkpad runs cooler than it ever has to date too at 810 @1.59 volts
obviously if it can run those speeds at 1.30 volts as sharedoc suggested it would benefit battery running too,would be nice,apart from that
alls the 600e needs is a bios with the p3cpu microcode update,which may benefit memory performance if correct instructions were given in dos.
i'm aware sharedocs been preoccuied with other priorities at the present
theres been some progress as far as linix is concerened,good work chaps

i found no improvements whatsoever in any pc
when upgrading from say 256 to 512 ram ,if anything 256mb seems more stable,however i did notice faster boot times upgrading from 256 to 1 gb
,others may disagree because of theory,but i know 256 is more than enough for any os +any apps+if one needs to assertain notable improvment ,don't bother with 512mb save install 1gb instead,if the bios allows.the coin one saves by staying with 256 ram can go towards a 7.2k hitachi drive,now that will make a big difference indeed.

ok well ive been reading through this forum and well i never knew my tp could be tweaked with this much. ive been looking to upgrade my 200mhz to the 400 but now that ive seen this i went to ebay and am planning on getting a p3 650 cpu and 256b of pc100 ram. in order to avoid the 127 error and the l2 cache prob exactly wat tools will i need (and where would help) to change the bios? ive tried to just open the bios and up the fsb but to my dismay i cant even find where ive tried del,f8,f9 and finally f1 opened up something similar to a bios but im used to an award bios on my desktop and have no idea wat to do with a laptop. i would really like to get this beast up to its max.
all help would be greatly appreciated thx
if anyone feels genorous and can email everything (like steps) to me it would be kool (tootintorrey@yahoo)

these tweaks should def be made into a site becuz this info is amazing

See my thread over here http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=7427

It has a log of all my upgrade efforts and details of how each step is completed.

Main tips -

Make sure you get 16 chip low density RAM modules

Buy some artic silver 5 to apply between the processor and the heatsink

Hold F1 when you power on to enter the BIOS - there is no way to up FSB via the BIOS, only hardware soldered mods can do this.

Ctrl D opens up the hidden BIOS editor in the configuration menu of the BIOS. Be careful only to edit the 2 offsets I mention in the other post as per the information in this thread discovered by Sharedoc (mad props)

Good luck and let us know how you get on.

Brokencase,

Does the bios test fail if you use old harddisk?

Tootintorrey,

200MHz sounds like Thinkpad 600, ie not 600E.

If this is true, then it is using MMC-1 processor which is different socket. Only PII's are available, no PIII's.

Bought a 750MHz PIII-MMC2-processor from Ebay for 72 euro+delivery costs. Have to wait for the delivery 1-2 weeks.

alright thx i looked it more closer and yes it is just a 600 lol. anyways if it takes pII processors mmc1 then how come some places say pII are mmc2? does this mean theres two types of this processor? o yea and it was a 266mhz my bad. how could i tell it is mmc1 or 2?

OK, It looks like the fast 108mhz fsb effects only the CDROM access. Just to be safe I have disabled the onboard memory.

My solution was to alter the fsb mod. I now have a switch to select 66mhz or 108mhz fsb. I long ago removed the internal modem, so I mounted the switch in the hole where the modem jack once lived. I just cut the resistor and ran two strands of ribbon cable wire to the switch. I then used a little 5 minute epoxy to hold the resistor body to the PCB. With a little engineering one could find other creative areas to locate the switch. Just don't put it somewhere where it could be accidentally bumped.

So now if I ever have trouble with CDROM access (or any other issue with the fast fsb) I will just power down and throw the switch to the low speed.

I think the CDROM issue only pertains to certain instances, like installing an OS. Normal CD reading seems OK. Perhaps it is something to do with the L2 cache not being enabled in cases where the CDROM is accessed?

I successfully upgraded to the 2.6.10 kernel with Arch Linux and I have also been able to make my l2cacheon module work with the 2.6 kernel.
I'll post a link to the module as soon as I update the documentation.

I think this cache enabling feature should be integrated into the kernel. Something that could be turned on with a kernel parameter would be nice. Maybe we should send an email to Linus with our 600z request.

BTW, The latest Arch Linux (0.7) is sweet. Not for the first time linux newbie, but it really is cutting edge. For example, the CD does not come with KDE, you have to pull that down from the package repositories. You also do not get kernel sources. In order to build my cache module I had to download the kernel sources from kernel.org

I only had to edit a couple files to get the wireles PCMCIA card to work. One was to enable the PCMCIA service, the other was to set "yenta_socket" and the last was the wireless script to tell iwconfig the SSID and the security key. Getting wireless to work was always a big pain with previous Linux distros that I have used.

I never had to configure X. it worked right off the get go! Amazing. My only issue is getting sound to work. Hotplug has problems with snd-cs4236 module during boot. This is no suprize since 600e sound never worked out of the box for any other linux flavor (except Arch 0.5!)

So, if your a diehard linux user you should give Arch a spin...

Tootintorrey,

Search eBay for "MMC1" and you get pics of processors for sale.
Looks like the highest MMC1 you can get is PII 400MHz.

:wink: he,he, i'm running 810mghz(108fsb)now,successfully modded the p3 750 cpu, after carefull assesment of the revised circuitry i procceeded in very similar manner to sharedocs methods with the 600-700 type cpus,where as the 750-850 types seem
to have relocated some resistors,good news is we can now mod the later 750-850 cpus too,as they have different ciucuitry to the 600-700 cpus.
making 1ghz a reality if one uses a turbo pll like sharedoc does.
my thinkpad runs cooler than it ever has to date too at 810 @1.59 volts
obviously if it can run those speeds at 1.30 volts as sharedoc suggested it would benefit battery running too,would be nice,apart from that
alls the 600e needs is a bios with the p3cpu microcode update,which may benefit memory performance if correct instructions were given in dos.
i'm aware sharedocs been preoccuied with other priorities at the present
theres been some progress as far as linix is concerened,good work chaps

i found no improvements whatsoever in any pc
when upgrading from say 256 to 512 ram ,if anything 256mb seems more stable,however i did notice faster boot times upgrading from 256 to 1 gb
,others may disagree because of theory,but i know 256 is more than enough for any os +any apps+if one needs to assertain notable improvment ,don't bother with 512mb save install 1gb instead,if the bios allows.the coin one saves by staying with 256 ram can go towards a 7.2k hitachi drive,now that will make a big difference indeed.

As soon as one comes up I'm going to pick up a 750 for my PAD. Could you give detailed instructions (diagrams if you could) on how you modded your CPU. When I get hold of my own I'll write a full Mod Log with photos etc.

Hi there,

I also updated my 600E with a PIII-500. For me it always works with full speed (maybe I got a cpu without speedstep? Some tools say it´s speedstep capable, the intel tool says it´s not). The Linux ACPI interface provides 8 throttling modes, these work fine (I´m able to throttle between 0 and 78%).

My 32MB onboard ram work very well at 100 MHz.

As for the cache enabling: we have a) a original bios and b) the code how to enable the piii l2 cache. It should be possible to find some unused bytes in the bios, insert the l2 enable code here and place a jump in some other part of the bios to execute the code?!

In the meantime as I´m running Linux 2.6 I searched the web and also found a module for cache enabling that´s suitable for 2.6: http://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/~challet/module/module.html


Cheers,
Sebastian