A Closer Look

Taking it off

We wanted to remove the factory attached heatsink and fan from our test processor to get a better look at the processor core and the L2 cache, but Intel has made removing the heatsink and fan without breaking the holding pins very difficult.

We managed to remove the casing by pushing out the holding pins with a case screw and a significant amount of force. We don't recommend trying this with your $700 processor. Each time we pushed out a pin we cringed at the loud snapping sound.

The Pentium III 600

The Pentium III 500

Her name was… OLGA?

The P3-600 uses the OLGA organic land grid array, "flip chip," packaging. In addition to using the smaller processor package, Intel has also removed the metal covering to improve heat transfer between the processor core and the heatsink.

Heatsink and Fan

The heatsink and fan gave the processor a nice sleek look, but we were disappointed with the small size of the heatsink. Like all the other P3 heatsinks we've seen, the P3-600's heatsink doesn't come into contact with the L2 cache, but the space between the cache and the heatsink is small enough to fit in a thin coin or gap pad to bridge the distance.

We also found a small square of pre-applied thermal compound between the heatsink and the processor instead of the usual thermal pad.

Back of the P3 600 PCB

Back of the P3 500 PCB

Cache

As you can see from the picture, our external L2 cache chips were manufactured by Mitsubishi, and they have the 300MHz speed rating clearly marked on each chip.

3ns 300MHz SRAM L2 cache P3-600

4ns 250MHz SRAM L2 Cache P3-500