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Intel Pentium III 550E 'Coppermine' Review
by Punchcard
There's
been a lot of talk lately on the net and in the newsgroups about how awesome
the new .18 micron Pentium III's are. People are overclocking these suckers
WAY past their rated speed bins without even touching voltage or resorting
to elaborate cooling methods. The 550MHz version of the chip seems to be getting
the ravest reviews - with it's 5.5x multiplier, getting 700+MHz out of the
box is as common as a 366MHz Celery hitting 550MHz. Always after more power
on a budget, I figured it was about time to jump on the bandwagon. I dropped
by AZZO and ordered up a brand spankin'
new P3 550E 'Coppermine' and an IWILL Slocket II converter card. $355 and
a week or so later, UPS dropped off a package here at the UC Crackhouse.
Join us as we take a quick journey with our newest toy! (click here
to go straight to the updated portion)
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The
new 550E, boxed and shrinkwrapped, freshly delivered to the UC Crackhouse.
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Our
new IWILL Slocket II, currently the FC-PGA-to-Slot 1 converter card
of choice. The 'bowtie' box is fun to wing around the room as well.
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The
trusty Tower o' Power, anxiously awaiting its new CPU.
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Let's rip
open the box with giddy anticipation and see what we find:
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The
Coppermine and retail heatsink/fan.
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Here
it is, the 550E in all it's bluish/greenish glory.
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I'd
hate to step on this MoFo in bare feet.
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The retail P3 package comes with a nice little Intel heatsink/fan.
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It's
a pretty good size, and well made.
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The
fan is pretty dinky though...
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The
heatsink is equipped with a thermal pad from the factory.
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We
hate thermal pads.
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Aah,
much better. Smooth as a MoFo.
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Lookin' good! Now let's take a gander at the Slocket II converter card:
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The
IWILL Slocket II. It's mounted in a plastic case so it locks right
in to the P2/P3 retention arms on most motherboards.
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Note
the plethora of jumpers. We left all these to "default"
or "auto", with the exception of JP8, which tells the card
that the CPU is an FC-PGA.
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The
CPU all mounted up and ready to ride. It's kinda hard to tell from
this picture, but the sockets' locking handle sticks up from the base
of the socket quite a ways. This might interfere with an oversized
heatsink.
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SL3R3,
the S-spec of champions.
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For
thermal paste, we used the Copper Goop from Overclocker's
Hideout. This stuff is the bizomb.
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Yeah,
we think this looks like a tiny little terd as well.
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Next,
we smeared the copper goop evenly on the chip and installed the heatsink/fan.
We're ready to pop this sucker in.
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You'll
notice the absence of the worthless little green OEM heatsink on the
BE6-II's 440BX chip. We yanked it off and replaced it with this bigass
custom heatsink from Tennmax.
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The
Coppermine in it's new home. Can you feel the love in here? One advantage
of the Intel hs/fan over the big aftermarket heatsinks: It doesn't
cover up any DIMM slots on the BE6-II.
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We buttoned up the Tower o' Power and hit the power switch. The moment of truth has arrived!
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Success!
First boot, BIOS reads 366MHz. (5.5x66)
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We
drop into Softmenu III and set up the new CPU as a proper 550MHz chip.
Note the 1.60 default core voltage. Coooool runnings.
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Now
it's time to play. We jack the bus speed up to 112, and are rewarded
with 616MHz.
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We
breeze through 682MHz (124MHz bus), 704MHz (128Mhz bus), 715MHz (130MHz
bus), 732MHz (133Mhz bus). We try a 140Mhz bus. This nets us 770MHz,
or 220MHz over the chip's rated speed bin. At default voltage.
Yeow!
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Feeling
bold, we go for broke with a 145MHz system bus. We post flawlessly
at 799MHz!
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We actually made it to the desktop at 799MHz, but the system quickly locked up tight. No amount of voltage tweaking would make 799MHz stable.* |
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After
a few days of playing, we determined that the CPU is stable at a maximum
of 704MHz (128MHz bus, 1/4 PCI divider) at default voltage. Here,
we do a few laps in Viper Racing, one of our favorite drunken LAN
games around the UC Crackhouse.
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Gotta
fill this space with something...ummm....The IWILL Slocket II and
Coppermine 550E - a match made in heaven. Get yours today from AZZO!
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One
more space to fill with an image - This is left over from the last
review we did - we discovered that the GlobalWin 50MM fans on Darkside's
old P3 heatsink will screw perfectly into the OEM heatsink on a Viper
550. Probably fit a Banshee or V3 2000 as well. Hey, waste not, want
not!
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Conclusion:
We rate the Coppermine 550E:
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Five
Beers
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Yep, five beers.
This CPU is just awesome. With a better heatsink/fan, 732MHz is a sure bet.
700MHz out of a 550MHz chip, at DEFAULT voltage? Awesome. For the
money, this is definitely the CPU to have.
I'll have to live with "only" 700MHz until my new 30mm
Alpha PAL-6030 arrives from Millisec.
I chose the 30mm version over the 35mm because it won't interfere with ALL
the DIMM slots on the BE6-II.
I didn't do any formal testing, but this is one smokin-fast rig. At 700MHz,
and with my Voodoo3 3000 clocked at 185MHz, there isn't a single game that
doesn't run liquid-smooth. I can't wait to strap on that Alpha and see what
this machine can do.
Discuss
this review in the UC Forum
Resources:
AZZO
Intel
ABIT
Motherboard
Monitor
Distributed.net
Our copper thermal paste was supplied by Overclockers
Hideout.
*A note on
our testing procedures - After a 5 minute cool-down from each test, we booted
the system into Win98 and let it run unmolested for 10 minutes at each tested
CPU speed, with both Motherboard
Monitor 4.13 and the distributed.net
RC5 client running on the desktop (mostly for purty picture purposes). The
RC5 client runs the CPU's integer unit at 100% utilization crunching some
seriously large numbers, and is a good stress test for an overclocked system.
If your system is gonna get too hot or burst into flames, it's gonna do
it running the RC5 client. Additionally, we ran IE5, Halflife, Unreal Tournament,
and good ol' Quake 2 to further determine system stability at each clockspeed.
Continue on to the update...
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