Introduction

More Pentium 3

This article was actually supposed to be a dual processor report. Come to think of it, we were also supposed to have a dual processor follow-up to our P3-600 New Stepping report, but we ran into a few problems.

After reading through a couple Intel P3 documents, we were under the impression that the new cB0 FC-PGA Pentium 3 processors are multiprocessor capable. We originally wanted to test the processors on our Abit BP6 motherboard with a pair of Neo S370 FCPGA-to-PPGA adapters.

We had everything ready. We had the BP6 motherboard. We had the Neo S370 adapters. We had a pair of cB0 stepping SL3XU P3-600E processors. The system worked fine with a single processor, but it refused to work with both P3-600E processors. Perplexed, we decided to go out and get a pair of P3-700 processors. It's the FiringSquad way: when in doubt, get more hardware. If it doesn't solve the problem, you still end up with more hardware.

Unfortunately, we had the same SMP results with the P3-700E chips. Apparently, we need to do a little soldering and swap our Neo adapters for BP6 friendly models.

We decided to whip up a short weekend P3-700E overclocking report while we're waiting for the new adapters to arrive (in addition to a couple of dual FC-PGA motherboards).

The chip

P3-700E FC-PGA

As you can see, our chip is an SL3XX P3-700E processor. The SL3XX S-spec code tells us that the processor is an OEM version with the cB0 core stepping. We had mixed overclocking results with our last batch of cB0 P3-600s. One could only reach 672MHz while the other was able to hit 858MHz, still below the coveted 900MHz overclocking range. How did our P3-700 fare? Read on and find out!