Project 560

Greetings! Welcome to the Tech Zone's newest project, where I take a mild mannered PII-300 and turn it into a 560Mhz Pentium III killing monster!

After getting the Project 527 system to run stable at 527Mhz (read about that here), I was wondering if it could go any higher. The short answer is no, Project 527 would not go higher than 527Mhz no matter what I tried. However, I had another system that also does 527Mhz. This system was based on the SL2W8 PII-300.

A little story on how I got my hands on this SL2W8. This unit was cherry picked from a batch of SL2W8s. My computer store, PC Planet, lets me test their CPUs and pick out the best one. It's interesting to note that I removed this unit from a computer that had just been sold . I thought I found the unit I was looking for when I notice there was still one more already installed in a finished comp. I decided to take that unit out and see how it did. Boy am I glad I did that! For some reason, this unit ran 2C cooler than all the other SL2W8s in the store. Here is the info from the CPU case:

80523PX300512P4 SL2W8
08400200-0022 COSTA RICA

For those who don't know how to read the above, here are the important numbers. 8 means it was manufactured in 1998. 40 is the week it was manufactured. The 300 means PII300, 512 is the amount of L2 cache, SL2W8 is the S-Spec and COSTA RICA is the plant it was made in.

For the past 6 months, this unit has been running 24 hours a day at 504Mhz and then at 527Mhz when I switched to the Abit BX6-2 motherboard. And it always ran cooler than the Project 527 system. This had me wondering if it would run at 560Mhz.

The Project 527 system has never made it into Windows before when trying to do 560Mhz, even with all the cooling fans that is in it. The system would freeze just as it was about to go into Windows.

The SL2W8 system didn't have all the cooling stuff that the Project 527 system had. The CPU was still in the casing and the L2 cache doesn't come into contact with the heatsink. However when I try to boot it at 560Mhz, it went into Windows and it worked! For about 15 minutes, then it locked up.  This had me very excited. I figure all I need to do is to cool this thing down and I'll have a 560Mhz system. That's always easier said than done of course. :-)

Project 560 uses the same equipment as Project 527, except one is running an OEM PII-300 (SL2W8) and one is running a retail PII-300 (SL2YK). Because of this I will not be showing you how I cool the video cards and case since you can read about that from Project 527. I will instead be showing how I got the SL2W8 PII-300 to run stable at 560Mhz.

Before we begin, a little disclaimer: This page deals with "Overclocking". Overclocking is running your CPU beyond it's intended speed set by the manufacturer (in this case, way beyond). If you blow up your comp while trying to do this, don't blame me! Clocking a CPU to this kind of speed can damage or even kill the CPU.

With that out of the way, we can get started. Feel free to Email me your comments/questions or post them to the message board.

I will be updating this page as I make changes to the system to try to get more power out of it so please check back from time to time.

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