Intel Pentium III (Coopermine)

The Intel PIII is one of the two most powerfull processors on the market along with the AMD Athlon. The real problem I have with the Intel offereing is there price. I dont believe that the PIII is better than the Athlon, I believe its close but no where near as the price difference suggests. The Pentium III was the first Intel chip to have SSE(Streaming SIMD* Extensions) * Single Edge Contact Cartridge Basically this was MMX 2, it does all the jobs that MMX was supposed to do and never really made a great job of. SSE contains 70 new instructions for the processor. The PIII has been marketed to be able to speed up your internet experience. Well ...  Read the complete review

How anyone can buy an Intel Pentium III I really do not know. They have been humiliated in every benchmark by the AMD Athlon and eventhough im not an AMD user I can still see that the PIII gets thrashed in every area. I dont use AMD because I feel that I get better value with my Cyrix chips but Intel are just ridiculous. They charge so much more for there Pentium 3 chips than the equivalent Athlon chips and they get outperformed so much. The only reason people buy Intel chips is the same reason that people buy 3dfx graphic cards. Its because they are brand concious. People are scared to stray from the norm of buying Intel and 3dfx and yet there are so many products out ...  Read the complete review

The biggest name in CPU’s, Intel, is definitely going through a bit of a sticky patch at the moment…For such a long time they were by far and away the only player in the processor market, with little or no accountable opposition to their undoubted dominance. However, when AMD released their Athlon, they started to make inroads into the dominance, by offering better performance at a much lower price. This soon became recognised, and the Intel Pentium III started to be outsold by the Athlon, and gamers were making the AMD their #1 choice of CPU. It has since been outselling the P3, with its superior performance and better pricing, and Intel are at an awkward ...  Read the complete review

The Pentium III 550E has to be the best choice for a value for money processor at the moment - if you can get one ! I bought a 550E in April of this year to use on my new supermicro PIIISCD motherboard and could not believe how easy it was to overclock it !! The PIIISCA has a jumper to override the front side bus setting contained on the processor. Setting the jumper to 133 rather than the default fsb I rebooted & then, to my suprise, even with the standard fan on the processor, my PC ran happily at 733! After a small tweak (adding another fan to keep the loaded temperature below 40 degrees) my PC really was firing on all cylinders. ...  Read the complete review

The best Intel processor to buy is Pentium III 550E. Notice the “E” postfix. It is one of the cheapest Pentium III CPU around, and yet one of the best one. I successfully overclock mine to 825Mhz!!! A real Pentium III 800Mhz cost much much more!! You need a 150Mhz FSB capable motherboard. The Abit VIA Apollo 133A motherboard is a good candidate. I am using Chaintech 6ATA2. Then you need good RAM. PC133 RAM is almost mandatory. Usually CAS2 PC133 RAM is able to run at 150Mhz CAS3. And as for all overclocking, you need some luck. I would say 70% of Pentium III 550E is able to reach 800Mhz and above. If 800Mhz is no go, then aim for 733Mhz, which is ...  Read the complete review