The LunchBox : Article - Tualatin-izing Your ABIT ZM-6

My motherboard is not Slot1, it's socket370. I don't have a slocket to mod so how can I put a Tualatin processor in my Celeron-only motherboard? Most slotkets took care of the pins required for Pentium3 operation which meant the standard '3 pin+bridge' mod would be sufficient. However, a Celeron-only, socket370 motherboard is very similar to modding a generic Celeron-only slotket but without the slotket. This new mod is so similar, we can reuse much of the info contained in that article.

Step 1: RESET pins

As you may already be aware, the RESET# pin moved when the Pentium3 was designed and RESET2# was added to the Tualatin design. RESET2#, pin AJ3, was added by Intel to prevent Tualatin CPUs from operating with non-i815E stepping B chipsets so we will merely insulate and forget about it. But we must bridge the old location of RESET#, pin X4, to the new Pentium3/Tualatin RESET# pin as depicted in Diagram 1 with a Red line.

We accomplished this using some thin wire and a soldering iron. Conductive paint may work but you have a lot of pins to avoid. Try painting the pathway and unwanted pins, first, with a non-conductive paint to avoid errors. Then make your connection with the conductive paint on top of the other paint.

Step 2: Open your ZIF socket

Remove the sliding part of the ZIF socket with a small screw driver(Refer to this article for help). Use a black pen and blacken-in the two indexed corners so you don't get the pins mixed up. Mark the following pins on the ZIF socket with black: AN3, AM2, AG1, AK4, AJ3, X4, X34 and Y33. Be careful since the pin numbers are reversed when looking down on the socket. If you look at the back of the motherboard, the pins of the ZIF *now* correspond to the pin numbering in the Intel pdfs.

We are going to use sticky tape to insulate these pins. Use your judgement to figure out how big the piece of sticky tape needs to be to cover the contact for each pin. Don't worry if the tape is too long. You can trim it down with a sharp razor blade.

After you insulate all 8 pins, you can reassemble the socket.

Step 3: Bridges Galore

The quick an easy method of Tualatinizing your ZM-6 is to power your Vtt pins using adjacent Vcc supply pins. If you would like to supply your Vtt pins with 1.5v, then check out the note below.

Check the following ZIF socket pins with a voltmeter for connectivity to Vss or Vcc: AN11, AN15, AN21, AL13, AL21, AK16, AH20, AA33, AA35, U35, U37, S33, S37, G35, G37, E23. If these pins are not connected at all, we need to bridge Vcc to them(Vtt 1.25v would be better, but we have to generate the 1.25v ourselves which is a mod we plan to do in the future). For our motherboard we had to connect(refer to Diagram 1) all of the above pins to nearby Vcc pins.

Note: We found the ZM-6 to be particularly good at overclocking the Tualatin Celeron so we devised a mod to our first mod to gain, hopefully, longetivity! We put together a method of powering all the Vtt planes with 1.5v from a single source. There is no reason why someone couldn't do a simple resistor network and reduce this single 1.5v source to 1.25v, but that's another story. If we substitute Vtt into the above paragraph as the source of current, we get our new mod.

Check the following pins on the ZIF socket with a voltmeter for connectivity to Vss or Vcc: AN11, AN15, AN21, AL13, AL21, AK16, AH20, AA33, AA35, U35, U37, S33, S37, G35, G37, E23. If these pins are not connected at all, we need to bridge them to 1.5v. For our motherboard we had to connect(refer to Diagram 2) all of the above pins to a nearby 1.5v pin(AD36).

We used a combination of conductive paint for the short runs and solder & wire for the longer runs. Yellow, non-conductive paint was used to insulate the pathway before we applied the conductive paint. Most non-metallic hobby paint will suffice. It made the mod much easier.

Step 4: VID pins

(Moved and expanded on, here)

Step 5: CPU Bridges

Grab your conductive paint and make the bridge from AK4 to AJ5(Check this article for optional AK4 bridges). Also make a seperate bridge from Y33 to X34. X34 is internally powered by the Vtt plane.

Finishing Step: Installation

Insert your Tualatin processor into your motherboard, remove the thermal pad & adhesive from the heatsink, apply some thermal grease, and install your heatsink. Clear the CMOS, then power-up. Go into the BIOS and set the FSB to 100, Multiplier to 9x, AGP to 2/3, Speed Error Hold disabled, and Voltage should be 1.45v. We were able to get our Celeron 1.2 up to 1.6 GHz 133 FSB at 1.65v which we set in the BIOS.