Pentium III 700 overclocking
by Björn Johansson

The Introduction - Pentium III 700 MHz. It's not that new, but it getting really cheap to buy. In fact the prices are low as $ 172 in the U.S. And since I know that the PIII 800 can be really difficult to over clock and the difference in the price is proportionately big, I decided to do this test. Also read rumors saying that the PIII 700 is also hard to over clock. Well, let's find out ...

The Basics - For you readers who don't know how to over clock, here comes some basics. There are two things that determine the speed of the processor. There is the Front side bus (FSB) and the multiplier. The FSB is simply multiplied with the multiplier. Simple, eh? In this case the default setting for the PIII 700 is 100 MHz FSB and the multiplier is 7. 100 x 7 = 700 MHz. So when to over clock you alter the FSB to get a higher CPU speed. But why don't you change the multiplier? That would make the over clocking more effective?

That was possible back in the days before Intel (and AMD) locked the multiplier to prevent over clocking. But alteration of the FSB is, thanks god highly supported by the motherboard manufacturers. Practically it's made through BIOS. On older motherboards you use jumpers on the main board. To make an over-clocked system run stable you might have to raise the core volt to the processor. It's the same procedure there, you change the in BIOS or with jumpers. But there is always a but… Over clocking raises the temperature in your system and may damage it. The components may be harmed if they receive a higher volt than specified. And no warranty in the world will cover that. So be careful and you might get a faster system for less $.

The Hardware

Intel Pentium III 700/100/256 FCPGA
MSI BX Master motherboard, i440 BX chipset
Creative 3D Blaster GeForce2 GTS
128 MB Corsair CAS2 memory
IBM 75GXP 30 GB HDD
Golden Orb fan (applied with Arctic Silver thermal compound)
SB PCI 128
Samsung SC-148F
48x CD-ROM
Intel PRO/100+ Management
Adapter MSI MS6905 FCPGA Converter

The Software - Windows 98 Second Edition Detonator 3, ver. 6.18 (V-sync disabled) MDK2 Demo (Default OpenGL Driver, 1024x768x32 bit, Trilinear filtering, Mipmap enabled, Full scene enabled, Hardware T&L enabled) 3d Mark 2000 v. 1.1 (1024x768x32 bit, 32 bit textures, 24 bit Z-buffer, Triple frame buffer and using D3D Hardware and T&L optimizations)

Next page: The Test