Intel Pentium II OverDrive

The high-end multiprocessor ready applications test flew on the OverDrive processors, often scoring in excess of 35% faster than the previous Pentium Pro system without the upgrade. As long as you're not expecting a huge 100% increase in performance, the Pentium II OverDrive should be able to give you your money's worth provided that you are of the select few users that could actually benefit from the Pentium II OverDrive…

Who should buy the Pentium II OverDrive? At a price tag of over $500, the Pentium II OverDrive does not come cheap. If you happen to be a fairly normal user that spent a few thousand dollars on a Pentium Pro system that is now grossly out of "style" and happen to have a few hundred dollars for an upgrade, you'd probably be better off getting a new Pentium II, motherboard, and SDRAM and re-using all of your old components (i.e. video/sound cards, etc…). If you happen to have a workstation with a minimum investment placed in it, as in you don't have 512MB of RAM to worry about going to waste, then pursuing a new Pentium II system would be the ideal choice. The only time you would want to consider the Pentium II OverDrive is if you happen to have a large sum of money invested in your single/dual processor Pentium Pro system or happen to require the faster cache of a Pentium Pro (i.e. a server), in which case, the Pentium II OverDrive, albeit a highly expensive solution, would come in quite handy. Keep in mind that the Pentium II OverDrive is nothing more than a Pentium II Xeon that fits into a Socket-8 running at 333MHz.  Who would have thought that Intel would come knocking at the doors of all of the old Pentium Pro users with the Xeon they never imagined they would be able to upgrade to.