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April
17, 2000 - By Dave
Altavilla
Over
the past few months Intel has been
releasing a myriad of processors
covering all ends of the performance
spectrum. Never before has the end
user had so many options to choose from
with respect to what host processor will
be driving their systems. Whether
you opt for Celeron, Pentium!!!, or
Xeon, you will also have a host of
flavors to choose from within that
processor subset. The widest
selection ever of Packages, Cache and
Clock Speeds are available to choose
from, regardless of your
requirements.
In
our last segment of "How Much Ya
Bench", we took a look at the P3
500E Coppermine FCPGA Processor with its
nimble 256K of on chip L2 Cache and the
ability to overclock like no other chip
we have seen to date. The 500E
comes with a multiplier of 5 times its
Front Side Bus speed of 100MHz. for the
specified 500MHz. HotHardware
recently received a Pentium 3 800EB from
Intel, for test and
evaluation.
The
clock multiplier on our test chip can be
set by the motherboard. This is
not the same obviously, as a retail chip
and all production units are dialed into
a specific multiplier. As with
the P3-500, there are two versions of
the Pentium!!! 800 on the
market. The 800E has a 100MHz. FSB
with a multiplier of 8. The chip
we will be looking at today supports the
800EB spec for an FSB of 133MHz. and a
multiplier of 6. Both processors
have 256K of on chip full speed Advanced
Transfer Cache, "Advanced System
Buffering", support Dual
Processor Systems and are manufactured
on Intel's .18 micron process. To see a
complete table of the various flavors
along with specifics for each chip, go
here to Intel's Pentium III Processor
Overview.
Here
are our obligatory "mug shots"
of the star in this feature
presentation.
Click
on all images for full viewing
Obviously,
there are a few differences in our
chip with respect to other retail
version you will find on the
market. In the top left picture,
you will note that our chip's step code
is "Q197ES". This is an
evaluation unit, not for resale. Another
interesting and very impressive
difference here is the Active Heat Sink
Combo that Intel used. Notice
the thin and curved fins that make up
the sink itself. These do an
excellent job of radiating heat.
We are not sure if this is indicative of
the type of set up you would get, if a
retail 800EB was purchased but we sure
hope so because it does a great job of
keeping things cool under
pressure.
Intel's
Processor ID program gives you
additional information on this CPU
(click image)
Enough
drooling here, let's plug this hot-rod
in and take it for a spin.
How
much we benched, next !
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