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Intel Pentium III 500E CPU and 550E FC-PGA Review
An anonymous reader says "This article on the Intel Pentium III "Flip Chip" 500/550E shows some great overclocking potential for this CPU. " Its a fairly technical article, but a nice one.
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Is it just me, or did the Athlon outperform everything on every single test. In most cases it was around 10 percent better or so. While the K6 was certainly not 'quite there', the Athlon is really pushing Intel to develop cooler technology, which in turn pushes AMD, etc, etc.
Which, of course, leads to better, cheaper technology for all of us.
Gotta love competition. If only a certain OS had competition all through the 80s like Intel is getting from AMD now.
We might have had free UNIX quite a few years earlier...
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
The Pentium Pro had an on-chip, but separate die, L2 cache. The Ppro "chip" actually had two dies. Still ran at full speed, though. Being off-die, they had to limit the line size to 32 bytes.
In contrast, the Celeron, Alpha, R10k, and I guess these new P3e's have on-die L2 caches.
I am currently running a Celeron 300A @ 450 Mhz.
I can certanly testify that the speed increase in games (and kernel compiling!) is signifigant. I have not benchmarked it I admit, but I can certanly feel the difference when it is at 300 vs. 450.
SMP won't help with Quake 3 Arena (It will under NT, Linux SMP for Q3A is not yet avalible) Or Half-Life, or many other games.
Half-Life for example is a very processor-dependant game. Many games currently are. Although graphics card technology is growing rapidly, few current games fully exploit the cards abilites. So, in short a high clock speed is VERY important.
SMP might help if you are running BeOS, as it can force multi-threading, but the current state of gameing does not support SMP, hence there will be no bonuses associated with it.
Having said that, My next system will be a Dual Celeron 366 PPGA on a Abit BP6 motherboard. I will clock the chips to 500 (possibly 550 with water cooling, just because its geeky). I am doing this because:
1) Linux will FLY on that system.
2) Quake 3 Arena should have Linux SMP by the time I get the Motherboard.
I personally am not all that interested in overclocking my Graphics Card, I dont think that the yield in framerates is enough. The CPU is a different story IMO.
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
But the Athlon motherboards do tend to cost twice as much as their intel counterparts, although I'm not sure if that's true with the new intel boards. But then who'd want to pay $800 for a 128meg RDRAM module anyway. Sales of those new intel boards must be down, way down!
The Athlon is a GREAT chip.
The problem is the fact that the motherboard manufacturers are scared to manufacture the Athlon boards. They are scared at what Intel will do to them.
Currently there are 5 motherboards:
Asus, Biostar, FIC, Gigabyte, and MSI
Some of these companies won't even mention these boards exist!
You can find all the info at www.tomshardware.com
Well, it did have one advantage - an onboard cache controller, which allowed it to cache large amounts of RAM, about 512 Megabytes. Most of the other Intel chipsets of that era (FX, VX, TX) would only cache 64 megabytes, which left people wondering why adding more RAM slowed down their machine.
.18 process they are using, which is what leads to the greater overclocking potential. Most of the .18 aluminummines will do 800 Mhz, where the physical limitation of the .25's was about 590. Still, I'll never own one, because I'm going to have an Athlon...
I think the biggest advantage of these new chips is the
--- "So THAT's what an invisible barrier looks like!" - Time Bandits
What is intel thinking trying to sell us RAM at these prices? I could buy a whole eMachine, including monitor and everything for the price of one 128meg stick of RDRAM. Is anybody actually buying these systems and paying these prices? I imagine some must, probably the big corporations that believe nobody ever lost their job buying the latest intel. Does anybody know when the prices for this ram might be going down? Or even better if intel has any plans to support the relatively cheap new DDR ram? I am really dismayed that intel thinks they can gouge us this way. We need to stand up and say "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more!" and then go buy a nice new Athlon.
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Mello like the Yello, but without the fizz.
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I just wish I could c:\format Internet
What does Intel think they're doing here?
A release of yet another chip based upon their out-dated and out-preformed PPro core? Who are they kidding?
It's not as if the new design actually came close to touching what AMD has in the Athlon, nor does it prove that this revamp is actually worth that much to an everyday user. Okay, some of what they did to the chip to speed things up are cool, but IMHO, these are ideas that should have been floating around for some time now. The pushing of the overclocking is cool, but again, this proves little to nothing when comparing it to anything outside of Intel chips.
I'm going to be keen on picking up a dual processor Athlon motherboard and another Athlon 600 processor in the next few months. Are we still looking at 1Q or 2Q 2000 for the dual processor Athlon boards?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
My question is just why this is a problem. You've got a selection of good boards at good prices, all of which are in stock. Even if there are only a few companies making them, why would this prevent you from buying an Athlon? Isn't this really a good thing in that it gives all of the manufacturers better volume than the more contested Intel market, thereby increasing the benefit for standing up to Intel?
I'd echo that - but with one very important qualifier that completely inverts the intent of your original post, namely "without knowing what they're doing".
The rules for successful overclocking are actually pretty simple - know the relationship between FSB speed and the multipliers and dividers that turn that FSB speed into AGP and PCI speeds, and how that relationship varies as a function of motherboard vintage.
Would I run a C366 (5.5 x 66 MHz) at 75 MHz FSB, to get 412.5 MHz? Hell no:
That "hell no" argument goes double if you ask me to run it at 83 MHz FSB * 5.5 for 458 MHz.
But if I crank that puppy up to 100 MHz FSB, I have - modulo heat - rock-solid stability:
- AGP: The mobo should detect 100 MHz FSB and switch to 2/3 of 100 MHz, or 66 MHz. You're running at spec.
- PCI: The mobo should detect 100 MHz FSB and switch to 1/3 of 100 MHz, or 33 MHz. You're running at spec.
That's right - as long as it can be cooled effectively, a C366 running at 550 MHz is more stable than one running at 412 or 458.A similar set of calculations can be performed for other CPUs running at other core multiplier frequencies, and will reveal different "sweet spots" where the PCI and AGP busses run in spec. (In an ironic twist, buying a "faster" CPU of the PII and Celeron vintages actually makes things worse :)
So would I allow some random kiddie who says "0vercl0cking iz k00l 4 gamez, d00d!" crank a production system of unknown processor vintage and motherboard capability to "as fast as you think you can get it, kid"? No, that's madness. He might have a CPU that'll run fine at 550 MHz at 2.1V, but not at 2.0V. Instead of turning the voltage to 2.1V and testing heat dissipation, he leaves it at 2.0V and "steps back" to run the FSB at 83. Two weeks later, the hard drive explodes and everyone blames overclocking. It wasn't the fault of overclocking, it was the fault of one particular overclocker.
But would I, if starved for speed (and cash - in that I couldn't afford to buy the speed off the shelf), allow an overcautious doomsayer dissuade me from applying overclocking in such a way as to get speed without sacrificing stability? No again - that would be just as insane.
Like everything else in computing - blind adoption and blind rejection is madness. A clued admin will realize that there's a middle ground.
If an admin has the power to select quality equipment, and the clue to tweak said equipment without risking stability, the right answer to "Admin, we want a fast server but are on a low budget" is "yes, I can do that, but only if you let me select every component and not quibble if the motherboard I choose costs $10 more than the cheapest one on the market."
You say it WILL fail... Well, everything will fail eventually. But I've had OCed systems that have run just as long as non OCed systems.
As the poster you replied to said, increasing a bus from 66 to 100 will almost always (and it's easy to check) simple increase the PCI and AGP divisors, and you'll end up with a system where all the components except the CPU are running at rated speed.
So, you can go from 366 -> 550 in your Celeron, and the only part that is running above spec is the CPU. And CPUs all came out of the same batch anyways, meaning you've probably got a CPU from the same set as others that ended up marked at 450s and 500s, so it's probably barely above spec.
So, if anything fails, it'll be the CPU, because it's the only thing that'll be running fast, and CPUs are some of the most robust parts. With a proper fan you'll get five or six years, easily, of 24/7 usage from a good CPU. If OCing it drop that a year, who cares? It'll still be many times longer than that system will end up in production usage.
Cons: Perhaps shorter CPU life. (unproven, with good cooling)
Pros: Cheaper, faster.
With the savings from buying a 366 instead of a 550, you could probably buy 256MB of ram, definately 128... That would boost the performance even more.
In a cost/benefit scenario. Your wages - at least $150 a day... The CPU price difference between what you buy, and what it would cost to buy what you OC it to - probably $100 - $200... So you're spending at most 30 minutes to overclock, toss a decent fan on, and test it. The math works out strongly in favour of doing the overclocking.
Who moderated me down as #^(&()% FLAMEBAIT? This isn't flame, moron, it's OPINION. However, by using the word 'moron' in this post, THIS is flamebait.
I'm sorry. What I meant to say was 'please excuse me.'
what came out of my mouth was 'Move or I'll kill you!'