Review Zone heeft de nieuwe PIII-550 op de testbank geparkeerd. Uiteraard willen we allemaal erg graag weten hoever we deze proc van 1700 piek kunnen overklokken...
Now if you’re a very experienced overclocker, I’m sure you’ll want to push the CPU even further, but sadly the Pentium III 550 isn’t very stable at 644MHz. I tried four motherboards, three types of CAS-2 PC-100 SDRAM and also used a TennMax P3 TF Cooler but the maximum I got was around 65% stability inside Windows 98 and Windows 2000 beta 3. Now all this is because of the processor’s L2 cache. The two PBSRAM chips are designed to run at 275MHz in this case. Up to 616MHz (which is 90%-95% stable) may I remind you the L2 cache operates at 308MHz, which is 33MHz more than its default operating frequency. At 644MHz, the processor’s L2 cache is doing 47MHz more than its supposed to. So unlike the Celerons and the Xeons which have L2 caches operating at core speed, the Pentium II and Pentium III are limited in overclocking because of the L2 cache. Otherwise, the current Pentium III core is able to max out 700MHz with the 0.25 micron architecture. You can, of course, disable the L2 cache and get the Pentium III 550 to be very stable at 644MHz. But this will result in the loss of a great deal in performance and will clearly defeat the whole purpose of overclocking, so the best setting is still 616MHz.
