Pentium III 600 overclocks as standard

Amidst the invective and praise heaped on my shoulders following last week's overclocking story, some interesting snippets emerged. Several readers claimed that Intel itself, while corporately standing on a chair screaming its lungs out at the very mention of overclocking, resorts to upping core voltages to achieve reliable performance of the current top-end desktop chip, the PIII 600. A quick trip to the Chipzilla website revealed that they were indeed speaking the truth. The latest SL3JT 600MHz P3 shares the same stepping, core stepping and tagRAM stepping as the original SL35E 500MHz chip introduced at the beginning of the year. The only difference is an increase in clock multiplier from 5X to 6X and core voltage from 2.0V to 2.05V. Such a voltage increase is common practice amongst overclockers striving to get maximum performance from a CPU and is needed to achieve reliable operation at higher than designed clock speeds. This would seem to indicate that the venerable Deschutes core is very close indeed -- if not already beyond -- its designed performance level. It is indeed lucky that Intel has Coppermine is lurking just around the corner... ®: Register factoid: The core voltage of Slot 1 processors is automatically selected by motherboards by means of five of the connections on the cartridge. When all five are connected to earth the voltage is switched to 2.05V. A handy chart provided on the Intel website shows the required combinations to increase core voltage to 3.5V -- please don't try this at home... Related stories Overclocking -- just say no Overclocking -- just say yes/no/maybe