PXI 8156 166 Mhz CPU upgrade?

[BlackArrow]

I am looking at installing Win 2000 onto a PXI 8156 controller with a 166 Mhz CPU, so is there a CPU grade path from NI for this controller? Or will it just take a 233 Mhz Pentium or even a 333 AMD, or will the mother board need to be changed�? Has any one swapped the CPU successfully?

[Claudia]

Hello,

We have newer controllers that ship with Windows 2000. The new family of controllers is NI 8171, and it comprises three (3) different controllers: PXI-8176, PXI-8175 and PXI-8174.
Each controller has different specifications. The processor speed ranges between 566MHz and 1.26GHz, and you have a minimum of 20Gb hard-drive. We fully support these controllers under Windows 2000, among other Operating Systems. If you are interested in using Windows 2000 for your PXI system, one of these controllers would be the best upgrade option.

You could try to upgrade the p
rocessor of your PXI-8156 controller from 166MHz to a higher frequency. However, because we do not support upgrading the processors or motherboards of our boards, we have not made any tests on this so there is not any information about it.

In the Applications Engineering department, we have installed Windows 2000 in a PXI-8156B controller, which has a 233MHz Processor. See KnowledgeBase 261E93YQ : How Do I Upgrade My PXI Controller to Windows 2000? for more information.

Hope this helps,

Claudia Lorente
Applications Engineer
National Instruments
http://www.ni.com/ask

[markwysong]

Actually, Claudia, I've looked into doing this myself. Unfortunately, when you look at the specs for the board, you can't speed up the clock to the CPU to take advantage of an upgraded CPU anyway, so you'd just be wasting your money.

Mark