The Slotket from Abit is designed to allow users of older BX boards to breath life back into their systems and give them a viable upgrade path again.

With Intel seemingly committed to go back down the 'Socket 7' type approach now after abandoning it on the pretence that it couldn't support the higher clock speeds, Intel have once again left those of us with the short-sightedness of taking what they were saying at face value and bought slot 1 boards, once again having to spend out on a new motherboard. When the Celeron was changed over to PPGA format, slot 1 to 370pin converters appeared like there was no tomorrow, giving everybody the choice of which route to follow. With the Pentium III now going through the transition to FC-PPGA, Intel have done it once again by changing the voltages on the chip so the existing converters and motherboards won't work. What we really need is a converter that can adjust the voltage without relying on the motherboard; cue Abit......

The Slotket gets around the problem most BX motherboards have of not supporting the voltages required by the newer CPUs by setting the voltage for us. This allows it to accept anything from a standard Celeron processor to the Flip Chip Pentium III and even the new Cyrix (now owned by Via) chips. To all extents and purposes it looks like any other slot 1 to socket 370 converter with one noticeable difference; it has jumpers on it. Although these may look a little daunting, these are necessary so you can set the voltage required for the CPU and also set the Front Side Bus you want to run at. The voltage selection ranges from 1.3V to 3.5V which covers just about any CPU in existence and the Front side Bus supports 66Mhz, 100Mhz and 133Mhz, both for Intel and the Cyrix chips.

The Slotket itself comes with a very substantial plastic casing that is very reminiscent of the original SECC 1 Pentium II CPUs, rather than the 'minimalist' (read cheap) casing approach on the SECC 2 Pentium II/III Processors. The biggest problem I found with most of the original Slot 1 to Socket 370 converters was that they were quite cheap and cheerful efforts and tended to wave about in the wind when they were plugged into the motherboard. The Slotket's casing eliminates this problem and it is kept rock solid in the motherboard supports.

When we were doing our testing, we left all the jumpers on 'Auto' so the FSB and Voltages were selected by the Slotket rather than fiddling about with jumpers. We used a standard Celeron 433Mhz CPU and initially benchmarked it using a Generic Slot 1 to 370pin converter on an Epox BX3 motherboard. Using our standard configuration, as shown in Figure 1., we got a Winstone of 20.5 which is quite a respectable score for the CPU. We then switched everything off and just replaced the converter with the Slotket and left everything else the same, re-benchmarked and got 20.9! Not bad for just swapping the converter!

As nice as that sort of performance improvement is, the main idea of the Slotket is to allow processor upgrades. Again here the Slotket doesn't fail to impress with our 600MHz Flipchip being recognised straight away, still with the settings at Auto. Again, not changing any of the settings, we benchmarked the system and got a Winstone of 26.4. Certainly not a bad improvement for just a CPU upgrade. Then as an experiment, we downloaded the latest BIOS upgrade for the BX3 motherboard and flashed the BIOS. This time on boot up it actually recognised the CPU correctly as a 600E Processor and again booted up without any problems. We benchmarked again, still without making any other changes, and this time got a result of 26.7; an increase of 0.3 for just upgrading the BIOS.

The main advantage of the Slotket is the ability to select almost any voltage, allowing future scope for utilising CPUs. The thing that has to be remembered is that when new motherboards are released they tend to support other things in addition to the latest CPUs, such as UDMA66 and 4X AGP that would not be found on older BX based motherboards.

On another nitpicking note, what does Slotket mean anyway? Ever since we received the product I've wanted to call it 'Slotkey' which would be a much better name, or at least understandable. A prime example of not adjusting a product for a different marketplace I am thinking. But what's in a name anyway?

Our testing showed that even if you're currently using a Celeron CPU in a BX Slot 1 motherboard by means of a converter, the Slotket is a great way to squeeze a bit more performance out of the system without having to make any other changes whilst still allowing you to upgrade in the future. The Slotket does what it claims admirably, although it is certainly worthwhile getting the latest BIOS for your motherboard when you upgrade the CPU in order to get it running at its optimum level. The only concern there would be if your motherboard manufacturer has stopped producing BIOS updates for your motherboard, in which case you may struggle to get the CPU working.

As always, there is never 'the right' time to upgrade any part of your computer system, least of all the motherboard and CPU, but the Slotket allows a great compromise to allow you to have the latest and greatest CPU running on your motherboard, or even just optimising your current system, whilst still saving or waiting for the next 'big' thing.