Hello, thank you for all your help in the past. today i have a question about the compadability of chips and mother boards with respect to the 'bus'. i have a Emachines 500is tower with a intel ceron 500mhz/66mhz bus chip. i would like to increase that bus speed to 100Mhz with an Intel celeron 1100mhz/100mhz bus chip. however i the guy at the chat line on Emachines.com said that the difrence in bus speed would not alow the chip to work. however i have hear that the bus speed is controled by the CPU itself and can be increased slightly without causeing damage. would the 1100mhz chip work? thank you! here is a "copy'n'pasted" description of the mother board from the emachines website eTower 366id, 366is, 366i2, 400i2, 400ix, 400id, 400idx, 400i3, 433i, 466i, 466id, 466is, 466ix, 500is, 500ix, 500i, 500idx, 533i Florida-TG/TGA Micro ATX (ATX V1.2 form factor) motherboard, TriGem, Korea Intel Socket-370 (370pin PPGA Socket) for Intel Celeron CPUs Intel 440LX core and ITE8673 Super I/O controller ATI Rage Pro Turbo built-in AGP graphics accelerator with 4MB SGRAM Crystal CS4280/CS4281 built-in Sound Blaster Pro, MPC-3, MPU-401 compatible Audio Enhanced Stereo full duplex operation

Ha! I got almost the same problem as you. I have a Trigem Cognac+(not an emachine, though), and I'm maxed out at 1.1GHz. It seems like that a 533MHz CPU is the max for your mobo. Sorry to burst your bubble, but I doubt that the higher FSB will work. http://www.e4all.info/motherboards/floridatg_end_users.htm http://www.e4all.info/motherboards/floridatg_cpu.htm You can always experiment, for a Celeron 1100/128/100 can be bought pretty cheap at ebay and if you fry it, hey, your learning experience didn't cost you an arm and a leg. http://www.powerleap.com/Products/neo.htm What I would do is upgrade to a new pc, but if your determined to give your emachine a last fighting chance, maybe changing the mobo+cpu+mem to a cognac(+) would be your best bet. eBay is full of bargins! (You prolly will have to upgrade the puny psu too if you did...take a look at www.e4all.info for information about emachines). Google is a wonderful thing :)! estatik *Disclaimer *I will not be responsible for any damage *done to your pc by application of my *advice

Forgot to add this tidbit of info: http://www.e4all.info/support/max_cpu.htm estatik

Corey: Emachines are built as "minimum systems". CPU speed is a combination of a bus speed and a multiplier. Your system has a maximum bus speed of 66mhz. Your 500 mhz CPU uses a 66 mhz bus speed and a 7.5 multiplier (66 X 7.5 = 500.) Provided the core voltages and socket are compatible (I do not remember if they are, or not), if you added in that 1100mhz CPU (100 X 11) it would actually run at 726 mhz (66 X 11) in your system.

thanks estatik, thats what i needed to know. today i asked a local shop owner, and he recomended the mobo, CPU, RAM thing too. he had an amd duron kit that clocked at 1300mhz with a mobo and uses my old ram for $140. Hwood, good info. thanks for posting, but it looks like the machine will require a pretty good overhaul to achive the perfomance i would like. thanks again!! Corey