The little chip that could (or couldnt), Via C3

Anaxagoras1986 · Feb 27, 2003

Seeing as how there isnt section for the little thing I figured it would be most appropriate to put it here - with the other under-dog, AMD

Anyhow, how many out there have messed with them? Miller I know you had one - what was the best clock you got out of it? I know that they offer very dismal performance for thier Mhz speed but it is cool how they put off almost no heat and it is something different from Intel and AMD.

The Little Falcon PC by FIC looks kinda neat too. Using one of these things at 1G and in an etremely small form factor - this thing makes for a decent DVD player. Hehe But for 175 bucks it is a bit much to spend on it for what it can do. Whats cool is that it runs without a hard drive and boots an OS from an integrated chip in about 4 seconds.

Anyone else have anything to say?

quegyboe · Feb 27, 2003

I think it's a definate contender for laptops and such where low power, low heat solutions are needed. The performance is lacking, but they still perform about equal to a Duron 800 (C3 1Ghz) which aint bad when you compare temps!

Digital Pimp · Feb 27, 2003

they have an on-chip OS ?

Digital

james.miller · Feb 28, 2003

max i got from my c3 was 1050mhz - 150fsb from a c3 933 erza core. that was at stock voltage - since the mobo didnt give me the option to increase it. it still wasnt enought to even play divx though lol. memory performance was totally crap. the best i managed with that chip was around 350mb/sec at 150fsb. i kid you not, it was BAAAAAD

to be honest - i cant reccomend them. they may run cool - but so does my celly-t @1.4ghh. Infact - it runs cooler with the volcano7 and very little noise than my c3 did with the passive heatsink.

BTW quegy - its nowhere near a duron 800. try pIII-400 and your nearer the mark lol

Gnufsh · Feb 28, 2003

yeah, until the nerhimeih or something comes out, the c3 FPU runs at half of the core clock, it is not a very powerful chip. We're talking 1GHz c3==500MHz Celly.

Supertrucker · Feb 28, 2003

i havent owned an ezra core but i had what i think was a joshua core, or somthin like that a couple years back when i didnt know more than the basics of putting a box together. it was a 600mzx socket 370 in a slocket. i bought it to "upgrade" my celly 400@500. ran cool, clocked all the way up to 800@8x100 and got about 2/3 the 3dm2k (yep, 2000) of my celly at 400. it ran office apps OK but not great, it would play dvd and divx for me though, but i also had a stripped clean version of win 98 with 512mb ram. but trying to encode divx i was lookin at 26-30 hours average for a movie. the short of it is that outside of a low power laptop for word and maby DIAL UP web browsing it shouldnt even be an option. just my .02$

edit: oh and mine had no l2 cache if im not mistaken, could be wrong though

Anaxagoras1986 · Feb 28, 2003

quegyboe said:
I think it's a definate contender for laptops and such where low power, low heat solutions are needed. The performance is lacking, but they still perform about equal to a Duron 800 (C3 1Ghz) which aint bad when you compare temps!

I dont think the C3 1Ghz can keep up with a Duron 800 in overall performance. I usually see the C3 at about the performance of a cellery 500. In some cases the C3 would beat the 500 and in others it would get creamed. And a 500 celery certianly cant keep up with a Duron 800 in overal performance.

pip · Feb 28, 2003

you could probly make a quad c3 laptop though lol portable folder

Anaxagoras1986 · Feb 28, 2003

james.miller · Mar 1, 2003

pip said:
you could probly make a quad c3 laptop though lol portable folder

no you cant. c3's arnt currently smp compatible. the erza-T cores are (>1ghz) but i havnt actually seen any yet lol

pip · Mar 1, 2003

james.miller said:
no you cant. c3's arnt currently smp compatible. the erza-T cores are (>1ghz) but i havnt actually seen any yet lol

well then we'll have to wait now won't we?

Anaxagoras1986 · Mar 2, 2003

Gnufsh said:
yeah, until the nerhimeih or something comes out

What special about it? I havent even heard of it.

Nickme90 · Mar 2, 2003

Those C3 chips are great for low power jobs though. I have made a small server with one of the mini-itx boards. Works great. The power supply is external 12v, like a laptop style one, no cooling required.

Gnufsh · Mar 2, 2003

The Nehemiah core supports SSE and, more importantly, has an FPU that works at the full clock speed of the chip, instead of half. Like I said, That's what's special about it, and even then, it's only special compared to the older c3s with their half-speed FPUs. AMD and intel chips rock it's socks off. WHy do you think a C3 gets beat by a celeron at half it's clock speed for a lot of things? It does little per clock cycle, and has components of the core running at half the clock speed.

The Nehemiah is also supposed to have some built-in encryption functionality, 64k L2 cache, etc.

Here's the blurb about it from the VIA website

nhanced Digital Media Performance Based on an advanced new CoolStream? architecture, new generation VIA C3? processor is available at speeds starting at 1GHz and is packed with a host of new digital media performance features, including support for four new pipeline stages, SSE multimedia instructions, StepAhead? Advanced Branch Prediction, an efficiency- enhanced 64KB Full-Speed Exclusive L2 cache with 16-way associativity, and a full-speed FPU. When coupled with the VIA Apollo CLE266 chipset, the VIA C3 delivers performance increases of up to 20% over the current version of the VIA C3 processor in mainstream productivity applications and up to 73% for 3D graphics applications. With its highly efficient design, the new VIA C3 also runs up to 40% faster clock-for-clock than the Intel® Pentium®4 Celeron processor.

Not that 40% more per clock than an intel P4 celly is all that much to brag about. My grandma could do that with three arms, a leg, and two monkeys tied behind her back.

-Dan

Giblet Plus! · Mar 3, 2003

If you really want a cool running processor, just declock a tbred.

Gnufsh · Mar 3, 2003

My tbred b wuld still put out 20 watts or so at 1GHz and 1.1 volts, assuming I could find a board supporting such voltages and assuming it would be stable at such a low voltage.

Gnufsh · Mar 3, 2003

Go figure. I just booted linux on my XP1700B at 7.5x133 with 1.1 volts. The thing's practically room temperature...

but I'm going back up a little...

Anaxagoras1986 · Mar 3, 2003

Gnufsh said:
The Nehemiah core supports SSE and, more importantly, has an FPU that works at the full clock speed of the chip, instead of half. Like I said, That's what's special about it, and even then, it's only special compared to the older c3s with their half-speed FPUs. AMD and intel chips rock it's socks off. WHy do you think a C3 gets beat by a celeron at half it's clock speed for a lot of things? It does little per clock cycle, and has components of the core running at half the clock speed.

The Nehemiah is also supposed to have some built-in encryption functionality, 64k L2 cache, etc.

Here's the blurb about it from the VIA website

Not that 40% more per clock than an intel P4 celly is all that much to brag about. My grandma could do that with three arms, a leg, and two monkeys tied behind her back.

-Dan

Thanks for the info.

The little chip that could (or couldnt), Via C3

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