Overclocking the FC-PGA Coppermine: Part 1

At 733MHz we have a $340 CPU that has the ability to topple both AMD's and Intel's 700MHz offerings, even for those users not capable of running at the 133MHz FSB, the 682MHz clock speed is pretty fast and definitely gives you more bang for your buck than purchasing a true 700MHz CPU.

Moving onto the 500E we see that the CPU performs quite competitively although isn't quite as fast as the Athlon 700, but for less than $300, are you going to complain if your CPU scores 0.3 Winstone points less than a processor that costs over twice as much?

One thing to note is that the Pentium III 550E at 682 is faster than the 500E at 667, so if you would have to upgrade your motherboard in order to get 133MHz FSB support, you're better off buying the 550E and using your current board at 124MHz leaving you with the option to later on upgrade to a board with official support for the 133MHz FSB and bump up your speed to 733MHz.

SYSMark 2000 offers a much more intensive perspective on real-world performance, and as we can see, the improvement overclocking the FC-PGA CPUs offers is quite noticeable. The 33% overclock of a 550E to 733MHz results in a 28% overall improvment in performance and the 24% increase to 682MHz yields a still impressive 20% performance boost.

With the 500E, the 33% increase in clock speed gives you an added performance kick of 26% and for those that don't have a board that supports the 133MHz FSB, overclocking to 620MHz (a 24% increase) will please you with a 21% increase in performance.

Once again the 550E at 682MHz just slightly outperforms the 500E at 667MHz.