I Fixed It, Baby

have you ever heard of such thing as a BIOS downgrade?

iya knp...

hahah I just did it
for the sake of getting (roughly) 40% increase of speed

ha ha
welcome to the 1990s :P

well, it's more to the late 90s, but yeah, hahoaohahoaho

he he...

That summarized what I've tried these past two hours. At first, the suspision was in the need to flash upgrade the BIOS --the Optiplex GX1 I am using has an A08 version of the BIOS-- since I'm upgrading the CPU from 450 to 650 Mhz. Two floppy-boot up with higher BIOS versions later, it still didn't work and a "Processor Type Mismatch" prompt popped up.

As had been proven from the past computers problems, I threw myself upon the assistance of the ever resourceful The Google. Somebody somewhere wrote that a downgrade to an A07 version is needed instead. So there, I tried to follow this piece of advice and voila, it worked.

Below is a glimpse of benchmarking the newly installed CPU as compared to two other CPUs that are kinda similar to my old one. It seems I gained about 33% increase of speed based on floating point operation.

Personally, I didn't really feel it.

Oh well. It's been fun.

Now, if I can find a better monitor somewhere. There are too much saturation, scratches, and ghost shadows around.