Slot 1 550E & 600E Overclocking

Written: 5/31/2000
Written by: MotoŽ
Global Win VOS32 supplied by: AMK Services

The Pentium III-550E is one of the best value in the CPU market today. Here is a chip that can be had for as low as $225 yet with just a bit of tweaking can run at 825Mhz.  While you can save yourself a bit of money by going for the new   .18u Celerons, there performance is not as great because of the small L2 cache.

We have gotten many emails asking which CPU is best for overclocking, 550E or 600E? To find out we rounded up two slot 1 CPUs and put them though our overclocking test.

The first thing to remember about Intel CPU is that they're multiplier locked. That mean you can't change the multiplier settings. The 550E had its multiplier set at 5.5X and the 600E is set at 6X. Since the multiplier is locked, the only way for us to overclock these CPUs by changing the bus speed. This is where the selection of a motherboard becomes very important.

To get our two Pentium E CPUs to sky high speed requires a motherboard that can run stable at very high bus speed. It also requires a motherboard that has an 1/2 AGP divider.  The motherboard we chose was the recently reviewed Abit VT6X4. The Abit VT6X4 is based on the new VIA 133A chipset. The main reason for going with this board is the 1/2 AGP divider. BX chipset motherboards like the BE6-II uses a 2/3 AGP divider.

AGP video cards like the Elsa Gladiac is meant to run on a 66Mhz AGP bus. When running your system on the stock 100Mhz FSB the AGP bus runs at 2/3 of that speed (66Mhz). The problem comes when you increase the FSB. By going to 150Mhz, the AGP bus increases to 100Mhz (2/3 of 150 = 100Mhz). A 100Mhz AGP bus is way too high for my GeForce video card. However using that 1/2 AGP divider of the VT4X4 gives me an AGP bus speed of 75Mhz (1/2 of 150 = 75Mhz). This is well within the operating limits of every AGP video card.

To make sure both CPUs has the best chance at acheiving a high overclocked speed, we remove the backplate and put a big Global Win VOS32 on them. Thanks to AMK Services for supplying the coolers.

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