Intel
Pentium III 550E Overclocking by
Dean
Overclocking
has long been the hobby of many cheap bastards(like me). Running
something faster than what it should be is quite fun and gives you
a great feeling. Remember the days of the Celeron 300A@450?
That time, it was clearly the best buy. It's competitor was
the Pentium II 450 and the Celeron gave the Pentium II a ride for
its money. That's very good considering a processor priced half
of the best processor thattime performs at par with it. The
next best Celeron was the 366 whicheasily made it to 550. The
most famous combo of this baby is theBP6-Celeron 366@550 since that
time, the early Pentium III processors werealready out.
So,
what's next for overclocking? Enter the CopperMine. By
changing the die size from the old Katmai and reducing it, the CopperMine
couldattain higher speeds and run cooler than the first Pentium III's. The
CopperMine also made use of the on-die cache running full-speed ascompared
to the 1/2 speed off-die cache of the Katmai. Running afull-speed
256K of L2 Cache is definitely better than running 512 at 1/2 the
speed of the processor.
If
you remember, the Celerons ran at 66mhz bus and the 300A and 366 easilyhit
the 100mhz mark. So a 300A running at 100mhz FSB would be 450
and a 366 would be 550. The Katmai ran at 100mhz bus already
butsad to say, it was not very overclockable. Hitting 112-124mhz
buswith stock cooling on some processors is good but jumping an additional
33mhz bus is quite hard. The CopperMine changed all that.
It overclocks very much like the 300A and 366 and sometimes, you get
even more than an additional 33mhz bus.
Theflavors
of the CopperMine. To differentiate the Katmai from the CopperMine,processors
are labled with letters at the end. E stand for 256K
L2 Cache while B stands for 133mhz bus. So there're processorslike
533EB, 600EB, 500E, 550E and many other flavors.
Overclocking
a processor already at 133mhz bus is kinda hard so I suggest you take
theone with the E only. There's the 500E, 550E, 600E, 650E and
others...
Enough
of that crap...what did you use?
