Pushing the mobo and chip to its limits

magick

Just wondering,
I have a L4S5MG motherboard, with a 1.8gig celeron, it can go up to 2.6 gig, but some of my friends said if i put a 2.6 gig chip into it,then i risk damaging the board, but could i pull it off , if i upgrade it to 2.6 gig, and put a heatsink into it that cools intel chips capable of 2.8gigs? Would it be enough to keep it cool for stable operation without damaging the motherboard?
thanks

Gerry

Ok, well if the board officially supports the chip there isn't a problem. Even if it doesn't, the chip will still work as it has the same fsb, but you risk overloading the power circuitry on the motherboard if it wasn't designed to handle over a 2 gig chip ( which I think is quite likely ).

In any case, you are much better off going for a lower speed chip such as a 2ghz northwood. You'll get a massive boost in speed just from changing to the northwood architecture, as it has 4 times as much l2 cache ( 512k vs 128k ), and has numerous minor tweaks to allow it to do much more work on each clock cycle.
The 2.6 gig chip won't show massive improvments over the 2 gig because it will be limited by the 400mhz fsb somewhat, and the 266mhz ddr ram.

Basically, get the 2 gig chip and try overclocking it by upping the bus speed, much more value for money.