Reading Your P3

Hi my name is…

Get to know your P3. Find out where it's from, where it was born, and how old it is. Let your CPU feel like you're interested. Overclocking is a relationship between you and the processor. Both of you have to want to overclock in order for it to happen. You can be all for it, but nothing's going to happen if the processor doesn't agree.

Now you're asking, how do I get to know my P3 if it won't even talk to me? It's pretty simple. You just have to read the signs. You can learn a lot from your processor just by looking at it. Those of you who have read our dual Celeron 550 article have a head start on the rest of us, but we'll let the others catch up.

Here's what all the numbers mean:

speed/cache/bus/voltage UL Identifier
FPO-serial# Country of Origin
copyright S-Spec#

Now let's take a look at the top our P3-500:

Here's an example for you

500/512/100/2.0V S1
99061131-0135 MALAY
I(m)© '98 SL365

We can see from the information that our processor runs at 500MHz. It has 512kb of cache, runs on a 100MHz bus @ 2.0 volts. The FPO number tells you the year and week of manufacture along with the country of origin. The first digit tells you the country of assembly, L or 9 for Malaysia and 1 for the Philippines. Our processor was made in Malaysia during the sixth week of 1999.

The second digit is the last number from the year it was manufactured, and the third and fourth digits tell you the week it was made. The S-spec tells you if the processor is an OEM or retail version, and the core stepping, but you need to check the S-spec against a list to learn that information.