Intel cc0 PIII 700E – Chip of Choice

UPDATE 11/21/00: Jim Springer’s cc0 Results.

Jim sent in his experience with the cc0s:

“I read your update on the cC0’s. Here are my results of 4 different cC0 chips:

• One did 1084;
• Another 1060 (both on a CUSL2 with Alpha cooling);
• Two are in a dual system that are both running very happily at 1027 with generic air cooling!

By generic I mean a $12 heatsink with a 6000 RPM fan that I found locally. Not Alpha quality, but so far they’ve been great. I’d go water cooling on the dual, but it seems the MSI 694D boards won’t go above 147 FSB. 😐 Heh – not that a dual 1.02 GHz box with almost a gig of ram needs to go any faster 🙂

I do a ton of overclocking and tweaking of my systems and it’s always high end stuff. My workstation is dual 1.02 GHz, 896 megs of RAM, 64 GeForce2, SBlive Platinum, 8 – 10k RPM drives, Adaptec SCSI RAID, etc; fantastic for checking emails. =) If you remember back earlier this year, I’m the nut that had the P3 750 (ca2 stepping) @ 1067 attached to the chest freezer – I also did that comparison of the 7 P3 650’s all from the same batch.”

Jim Springer

UPDATE 11/17/00: Peltier Cooling.

I spent about two hours using a Swiftech MC370 on the PIII 700E to see if I could break through 1050 MHz. Unfortunately, this CPU just will not make it beyond 1050 stable. It would post at both 7 x 155 = 1085 and 7 x 160 = 1120, but it would reset at the Windows splash screen and start posting all over again.

It cooled to about 10C/50F when running the peltier and fan separately from the motherboard’s power supply, but not lower. At 1.85 volts, the CPU is radiating about 36-37 watts at these speeds, not terrible to cool but you need more horsepower to get it appreciably lower.

All told, the PIII 700E is a good price/performance upgrade to hit One GHz if your RAM and peripherals are up to the challenge of FSBs over 133 MHz. This is one area where AMD’s Socket A CPUs currently have a clear edge over Intel: Multiplier overclocking is much preferred. How long this lasts – no word yet.

UPDATE 11/15/00: Getting to 1050 MHz.

I used water cooling on the system outlined below and found it stable with Prime95. I could make it to the Windows splash screen at 1085 MHz but then it would freeze. Prime 95 temp: 27C/81F at an ambient temp of 20.4C/69F. Peltier cooling next – stay tuned.

SUMMARY 11/13/00: Intel’s new cc0 PIII 700E is an excellent choice to break the GHz barrier and not your wallet.

Breaking 1 GHz only a short time ago was a major accomplishment; now it’s more like “What else is new?” Incredible how far and how fast we’ve come from the Celeron 266 days.

The choice facing those of us who want to upgrade to 1 GHz is AMD or Intel? If you have an Intel platform, the question is which CPU gives you a reasonable chance of hitting one gig without busting your wallet. I think the new stepping cc0 PIII 700E is that chip. We’re hearing a lot of good things about it and PC Nut was kind enough to send one our way to play with. I have to say it’s a honey.

The first thing I did was to run it a while at spec speed and voltage to see how it handled. I ran Prime95 for an hour on an Iwill VD133 Pro, 128 MB HSDRAM (7 ns), cooling the CPU with an Alpha PAL6035*, Papst 33 cfm fan, greased with Arctic Silver. With ambient at 20C/68F, temps stabilized at 27C/81F.

After that, I started to ratchet up the FSBs and voltage to 1.86 v to see what it could do. When I hit 1008 MHz (7 x 144), I ran a series of benches at both 1008 MHz and 1050 MHz with very nice results:

Even though I could run all benches, Prime 95 failed after about 15 minutes at 1050 MHz.

What’s impressive are the temps under Prime95: Not more than 34C/93F with an ambient of 20C/68F. This CPU is generating a mere 33 watts at these settings; a Duron at the same settings would be blasting out about 51 watts. It also suggest that more aggressive cooling (e.g, peltier) will yield some nice gains. We’ll try that shortly.

In sum, I think this is a perfect upgrade CPU for folks who want to stay with their Intel boards and want a good shot at 1 GHz. For about the same price, you could get a Duron 800 and an ABIT KT7 (no raid), but not the same performance. We’ll be doing some comparisons shortly.

Many thanks to PC Nut for allowing us to play with this one. And thanks to Intel for a nice stepping revision.

Email Joe