Introduction

Yet another one

You may be wondering why we've only been testing Intel CPUs lately. Why no Athlons you ask? Is Intel paying us off? Are we purposely ignoring AMD? No. We haven't had many Athlon overclocking articles simply because we don't want to destroy other people's property.

FiringSquad has plenty of contacts in the hardware business, but we often procure our hardware in roundabout ways. Yes, we get a lot of hardware, namely video cards and motherboards, directly from the manufacturers, but we also borrow quite a bit of equipment from our various industry contacts.

Overclocking an Athlon requires you to yank apart the CPU case in order to use a golden fingers type device that will allow you to change the CPU's clock multiplier. Yes, we could just stick to the motherboard's FSB adjustments and leave the CPU intact, but that's like kissing your sister, which would be perfectly acceptable except for the fact that we're not in Arkansas. Since we don't want to destroy borrowed CPUs, we generally stick to processors that can be overclocked without any physical modifications.

P3-800E SECC2

That said, we have another Pentium 3 overclocking report today. We managed to get our hands on a pair of SECC2 P3-800 "cB0" stepping processors. As we mentioned in our last stepping article, "cB0" is the latest Intel Pentium 3 stepping. It's mainly a yield enhancement stepping, but it does finally enable SMP on the FC-PGA processors. On a side note, we're still working on the dual report, and yes, we do have a set of Powerleap Neo-S370 adapters.

P3-800E

The back

Getting back to the processors, we have two SL3XR P3-800E chips which retail for about $575 each. As you can see from the pictures, we have two SECC2 processors. It's strange seeing Slot-1 chips again after going through countless FC-PGA chips in the past few weeks.