Overclocking the FC-PGA Coppermine: Part 1

The Candidates

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We took two OEM FC-PGA Pentium III 500E CPUs, ran them at their default core voltage of 1.60v and used a Foxconn Socket-370 heatsink/fan combo all on an Iwill Slocket-II adapter to see how far we could push the chips. The first test was on an ABIT BE6 using the 124MHz FSB setting, and both chips passed all of our stability tests conducted over a 48 hour period consisting of looped runs of SYSMark 2000 and Content Creation Winstone 2000. The resulting 500 to 620MHz overclock was a success without even increasing the core voltage or using extreme cooling methods. While the Foxconn heatsink/fan combo was an exceptionally well made unit, it's definitely far from overkill and shouldn't set you back more than $15 at most.

Our BE6 even allowed us to increase the FSB frequency to 133MHz resulting in a 33% overclock to 667MHz, and although our TNT2 Ultra and GeForce test cards would not run at the increased AGP frequency in any 3D applications/games, the system was otherwise completely stable. Once again, this was at the default 1.60v core voltage and using the same Foxconn heatsink/fan combo.

We took a similar approach to the 550E processor and repeated the same tests, only this time, using two 550E CPUs. The one thing you have to understand is that the 500E and 550E CPUs are virtually the same; Intel's yields are already incredibly high on their 0.18-micron process and as a result there is very little difference between a CPU that's rated at 500MHz and one that's rated 550MHz, so their overclocking potential should be basically the same. Using the same 124MHz FSB setting, the 550Es had no problem making it up to 682MHz using the exact same heatsink/fan combo. Unfortunately, the Iwill Slocket-II does not connect the pin required for the BE6's Winbond hardware monitoring chip to read from the thermal diode of the processor, so we could not accurately report the temperatures of the CPU.

Once again we pushed the limits of our BE6 test bed and increased the FSB to 133MHz, and the 550E had no problem running at the new 733MHz setting. Keep in mind that this is a $340 CPU running at 733MHz without any added cooling or core voltage tweaks. As with the first 133MHz FSB tests we ran on the BE6, the 550E at 733MHz was no different in that the TNT2 and GeForce cards we tossed at it would lock up during any games or other 3D applications.