The Tech Zone Slot 1 550E & 600E Overclocking

Slot 1 550E & 600E Overclocking

The computer used to do the overclocking test is made up of the following products:

Enlight EN7237 Case
Abit VT6X4 Motherboard
128 Megs Corsair PC-133 SDRAM
Pioneer 16X DVD ROM
Maxtor 40 GIG 7200 RPM HD
Aureal Vortex SQ2500 PCI Sound Card
Smarfast PCI NIC
Windows 98 SE

First up was the P3-550E. The maximum bus speed of the Abit VT6X4 is 150Mhz. That would give us 825Mhz (150x5.5=825Mhz), a nice round number. Since this is the CPU used for LAN 825, it came as no surprise that 825Mhz was what it did. And it did it below stock voltage.

I was looking forward to trying the P3-600E. There were dreams of 900Mhz dancing in my head. Firing up the system on the 150Mhz bus froze the comp at the splash screen. Increasing the voltage to the maximum allowed by the Abit motherboard didn't help either. 900Mhz was not to be for this CPU.

Next I tried backing down the bus speed to 140Mhz. This would give me 840Mhz (140x6=840Mhz). The comp fired up and went pass the slash screen but no further. Again, increasing the voltage didn't make a difference. By this time I was getting kinda dejected.

With bus speed set to 133Mhz, the system finally got into Windows, where it remain 100% stable and ran any programs or games I tossed at it. However, at the 133Mhz bus, it was "only" running 800Mhz. The P3-550E was faster. It was interesting to note that when the bus speed was set to 133Mhz, the BIOS detected the CPU as a P3-800EB processor.

While I'm sure the PIII-600E can run 825Mhz just like the PIII-550E, the Abit VT6X4 motherboard doesn't have a bus speed for me to set this speed. Both CPUs were able to do their maximum speed at 1.6V which is .01V below the factory setting.

Performance wise, the PIII-550E at 825Mhz was a bit faster than the PIII-600E at 800Mhz. This has more do the fact that the 550E is running on a 150Mhz bus and the 600E is running on a 133Mhz bus.

Given the above results, the PIII-550E seem the better deal. It's less expensive and overclocked higher. Because it needed a 150Mhz bus to reach 825Mhz you have to make sure your RAM can run at that high a bus speed. If you have normal PC-133 RAM it may be a better idea to go with the PIII-600E at 800Mhz. Not all PC-133 can run on a 150Mhz bus. As a matter of fact most can't. The Corsair PC-133 I used has no problem on the 150Mhz bus. Of course you can also back down the RAM speed in the Abit VT6X4 BIOS but who wants to do that?

If you were building a system from scratch with a motherboard like the Abit VT6X4 with good quality PC-133 RAM then I would take the PIII-550E over the PIII-600E. If on the other hand you're doing a CPU upgrade with an older BX motherboard, then the PIII-600E maybe the way to go, since your AGP video card most likely won't work above 133Mhz in a BX motherboard. Whichever way you go, you won't be sorry with the results.

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