Intel Pentium III E FC-PGA (Socket-370)

There are a handful of Socket-370 to Slot-1 converter cards available on the market, but, unfortunately, not a single one will aid you in installing a FC-PGA chip in a Slot-1 motherboard.

The Slot-1 Pentium III Es had to be backwards compatible with older motherboard designs and thus they don’t require adherence to the VRM 8.4 specification. At the same time, Intel was looking to push the VRM 8.4 guidelines into the industry so that they would eventually become well supported; the ideal way of doing that would be with a CPU that was never intended to be used in anything other than a new Socket-370 motherboard -- the FC-PGA Pentium III E.

Since no Slot-1 motherboard is currently VRM 8.4 compliant and a Socket-370 to Slot-1 adapter simply acts as a converter (it does not feature its own VRM header), installing a FC-PGA on a Socket-370 to Slot-1 converter card and plugging it into a Slot-1 motherboard won’t work.

While this holds true for all current converter cards, it may be possible to produce a Socket-370 to Slot-1 converter with an on-board VRM that meets the 8.4 guidelines and enable FC-PGA support on Slot-1 BX boards. A card like that would definitely cost more than the $15 we’re used to paying for Socket-370 converter cards and may end up not being worth the trouble depending on the price you get the CPU for.

The 0.18-micron fabrication process makes the FC-PGA an incredible candidate for a hard core overclocker’s chip. We received a test sample that was rated at 600MHz and it easily made it to the 700MHz mark without a problem (the sample was not clock locked so we could adjust the clock multiplier to 7x for 700MHz). The fact that 600MHz samples are floating around indicate that the FC-PGA chips are already capable of hitting 600MHz, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see 500MHz FC-PGA chips running at 620MHz (124MHz x 5) with a little bit of added cooling.

The overclocking potential of the FC-PGA chips should be identical to that of the Slot-1 Pentium III E models since they are essentially the same chip; the latter just places the chip on a card.

An interesting chip to keep an eye on will be the FC-PGA Pentium III 500E. Its 5.0x multiplier, when used with the 133MHz FSB may be able to push the chips up to 667MHz. Our 600MHz sample already proved that 700MHz is quite possible for this chip and, as the yields on the 0.18-micron parts increase, the overclocking potential should increase as well. The 500E at 667 should be an interesting overclock to keep a look out for and we’ll keep you updated as to how feasible this is as the 500Es hit the streets in greater quantities. The only i810E motherboard we had in lab during the testing for this review was Intel’s own i810E board, which obviously frowns upon overclocking and thus does not enable the 133MHz FSB settings on CPUs that aren’t 133MHz FSB CPUs so we could not test this theory.