PII vs PIII

It looks like the machine I have (an HP Kayak XAS, you may have seen me
mention it already) can be upgraded from a PII 400MHz to dual PIII 600MHz.
But the PIII's are substantially more expensive than the PII's, around $70
each compared to $10 each.

I guess I'm not that excited about a 50% increase in clock rate, by
itself. But is there a great advantage just in going from a PII to a PIII
with a comparable clock speed? Would I get substantially more computing
for the money?

--
"Is that plutonium on your gums?"
"Shut up and kiss me!"
-- Marge and Homer Simpson

Martha Stewart called it a Good Thing (Gregory L. Hansen)wrote:
It looks like the machine I have (an HP Kayak XAS, you may have seen
me mention it already) can be upgraded from a PII 400MHz to dual
PIII 600MHz. But the PIII's are substantially more expensive than
the PII's, around $70 each compared to $10 each.

I guess I'm not that excited about a 50% increase in clock rate, by
itself. But is there a great advantage just in going from a PII to
a PIII with a comparable clock speed? Would I get substantially
more computing for the money?

The bigger win there is liable to be in moving to faster and more
copious amounts of memory that you can get cheaply.

Jumping to even newer generations has the merit that you can get 512MB
sticks of memory very cheaply. I would expect _that_ to, by and
large, be the dominant reason to prefer fancy new architectures.
--
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"La Cicciolina [...] Electing her was an interesting contrast to the
situation in the UK: In Italy they elect a representative from the sex
industry. In the UK, they elect their clients." -- Peter Gutmann

It looks like the machine I have (an HP Kayak XAS, you may have seen me
mention it already) can be upgraded from a PII 400MHz to dual PIII
600MHz.
But the PIII's are substantially more expensive than the PII's, around
$70
each compared to $10 each.

I guess I'm not that excited about a 50% increase in clock rate, by
itself. But is there a great advantage just in going from a PII to a
PIII
with a comparable clock speed? Would I get substantially more computing
for the money?

There *can* be an advantage, but whether it's important to you is
debatable. Early P3's had the same cache architecture as the P2's -
namely, external cache running at half of the CPU's clock speed. Starting
around the 600 MHz mark, you were able to get P3's with on-die cache
running at full CPU speed.

So, if cache latency is a deal-breaker for your application, the extra
money would be worth it. If not, then it's a lot more of a
personal-preference type of thing.

As a side note, I'm surprised that a P3/600 would be $70, seeing that
you can buy something like an Athlon 2400+ for less than that. I looked
over on ebay, and found the P3's running $20 to $30 each.

steve

In article ,
Steve Wolfe wrote:
It looks like the machine I have (an HP Kayak XAS, you may have seen me
mention it already) can be upgraded from a PII 400MHz to dual PIII
600MHz.
But the PIII's are substantially more expensive than the PII's, around
$70
each compared to $10 each.

I guess I'm not that excited about a 50% increase in clock rate, by
itself. But is there a great advantage just in going from a PII to a
PIII
with a comparable clock speed? Would I get substantially more computing
for the money?

There *can* be an advantage, but whether it's important to you is
debatable. Early P3's had the same cache architecture as the P2's -
namely, external cache running at half of the CPU's clock speed. Starting
around the 600 MHz mark, you were able to get P3's with on-die cache
running at full CPU speed.

So, if cache latency is a deal-breaker for your application, the extra
money would be worth it. If not, then it's a lot more of a
personal-preference type of thing.

As a side note, I'm surprised that a P3/600 would be $70, seeing that
you can buy something like an Athlon 2400+ for less than that. I looked
over on ebay, and found the P3's running $20 to $30 each.

There's a wide range of prices, so I tried to generalize, and I was
looking specifically at PIII 600MHz 512 cache. I was thinking especially
of a matched pair I saw for something over $100, although they had 256K
cache.

I suppose I should make sure I can get the system up and running in the
first place, before I start worrying about upgrading it. I'm still
waiting for some cables and adapters to arrive so I can plug it into my
monitor, so I still can't see what I'm doing and it's just sitting there
with a clean hard drive right now.
--
"Is that plutonium on your gums?"
"Shut up and kiss me!"
-- Marge and Homer Simpson

On Fri, 10 Oct 2003 17:34:03 UTC in comp.os.linux.hardware,
(Gregory L. Hansen) wrote:

There's a wide range of prices, so I tried to generalize, and I was
looking specifically at PIII 600MHz 512 cache. I was thinking especially
of a matched pair I saw for something over $100, although they had 256K
cache.

The fact that the top speed for this board is 600MHz leads me to think
that it will only work with the "Katmai" flavour of P-III not with its
successor the "coppermine". The Coppermine was the one where they
halved the amount of L2 cache on the basis that they made it full
speed at the same time. These chips require a lower core voltage than
the Katmai ones and some motherboards don't have voltage regulators
that are capable of supplying the correct one. So, if it says top
speed is 600MHz they probably mean that you're limited to the older,
512KB cache, P-III's.

--
Trevor Hemsley, Brighton, UK.

The fact that the top speed for this board is 600MHz leads me to think
that it will only work with the "Katmai" flavour of P-III not with its
successor the "coppermine". The Coppermine was the one where they
halved the amount of L2 cache on the basis that they made it full
speed at the same time. These chips require a lower core voltage than
the Katmai ones and some motherboards don't have voltage regulators
that are capable of supplying the correct one. So, if it says top
speed is 600MHz they probably mean that you're limited to the older,
512KB cache, P-III's.

It still might pay to check if it will support them or not - there are a
number of boards which were originally designed for P2's which also had
the flexibility to support the P3 Coppermines - my home machine, with a
650 MHz P3, is running on such a motherboard.

steve

In article ,
Trevor Hemsley wrote:
On Fri, 10 Oct 2003 17:34:03 UTC in comp.os.linux.hardware,
(Gregory L. Hansen) wrote:

There's a wide range of prices, so I tried to generalize, and I was
looking specifically at PIII 600MHz 512 cache. I was thinking especially
of a matched pair I saw for something over $100, although they had 256K
cache.

The fact that the top speed for this board is 600MHz leads me to think
that it will only work with the "Katmai" flavour of P-III not with its
successor the "coppermine". The Coppermine was the one where they
halved the amount of L2 cache on the basis that they made it full
speed at the same time. These chips require a lower core voltage than
the Katmai ones and some motherboards don't have voltage regulators
that are capable of supplying the correct one. So, if it says top
speed is 600MHz they probably mean that you're limited to the older,
512KB cache, P-III's.

I didn't realize there was such a difference between a PIII 600MHz 512K
cache and a PIII 600MHz 256K cache. Are all PIIIs with 512K Katmais, and
all PIIIs with 256K coppermines?

When I asked about the VRM, I was told the part number 0950-2837 was for
any PII/PIII up to 600MHz, and they specifically said it's not for
"coppermine". I've asked if the machine would support a faster PIII if a
different VRM were installed, but haven't gotten an answer yet, and I'm
beginning to wonder if I will. I think the motherboard has the 440BX
chipset, if that makes a difference, but I know it also matters which
motherboard the chipset is sitting on. And maybe a BIOS upgrade, which HP
may or may not have, and which I've never done.

The more I learn about this, the more it all gets complicated by little
bits of information like what you've just said above.
--
"Is that plutonium on your gums?"
"Shut up and kiss me!"
-- Marge and Homer Simpson

"Gregory L. Hansen" wrote in message
...
In article ,
Trevor Hemsley wrote:
On Fri, 10 Oct 2003 17:34:03 UTC in comp.os.linux.hardware,
(Gregory L. Hansen) wrote:

There's a wide range of prices, so I tried to generalize, and I was
looking specifically at PIII 600MHz 512 cache. I was thinking
especially
of a matched pair I saw for something over $100, although they had 256K
cache.

The fact that the top speed for this board is 600MHz leads me to think
that it will only work with the "Katmai" flavour of P-III not with its
successor the "coppermine". The Coppermine was the one where they
halved the amount of L2 cache on the basis that they made it full
speed at the same time. These chips require a lower core voltage than
the Katmai ones and some motherboards don't have voltage regulators
that are capable of supplying the correct one. So, if it says top
speed is 600MHz they probably mean that you're limited to the older,
512KB cache, P-III's.

I didn't realize there was such a difference between a PIII 600MHz 512K
cache and a PIII 600MHz 256K cache. Are all PIIIs with 512K Katmais, and
all PIIIs with 256K coppermines?

Yep. Default core voltage for Katmai is 2.0v and for early coppermine 1.7v.

When I asked about the VRM, I was told the part number 0950-2837 was for
any PII/PIII up to 600MHz, and they specifically said it's not for
"coppermine". I've asked if the machine would support a faster PIII if a
different VRM were installed, but haven't gotten an answer yet, and I'm
beginning to wonder if I will. I think the motherboard has the 440BX
chipset, if that makes a difference, but I know it also matters which
motherboard the chipset is sitting on. And maybe a BIOS upgrade, which HP

may or may not have, and which I've never done.

Some BX boards handle coppermines fine. I have three BXs here running
coppermine CPUs. Some boards require a BIOS upgrade to enable the lower
vcore/different instuction set/microcode, some boards just can't handle
coppermines.

The more I learn about this, the more it all gets complicated by little
bits of information like what you've just said above.

It's all good fun though. I have several clone machines that started life as
PII350s that I got cheaply at auction and now are running various CPUs. The
best of them is a machine I am running as an internet gateway/file server on
our home LAN. It has a coppermine celeron 600 running at 927MHz with just a
slight core voltage increase running in a slightly modified 'slocket' with
standard heatsink. It benchmarks better than a PIII850. A bit af a waste of
a CPU really, the only difference I notice between it and the PII350 it
originally had is SETI work units are done in less than 10 hours now when
they took 18+ hours with the PII. My main machine is an Athlon XP 2200+
(1800MHz) that does work units in 4 hours.

As I said, it's all good fun.
--
~misfit~


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On Fri, 10 Oct 2003 18:31:51 UTC in comp.os.linux.hardware,
(Gregory L. Hansen) wrote:

Are all PIIIs with 512K Katmais, and
all PIIIs with 256K coppermines?

I think all P-II and P-III processors prior to coppermine had 512KB,
half speed cache.

beginning to wonder if I will. I think the motherboard has the 440BX
chipset, if that makes a difference

One of the better Intel chipsets.

--
Trevor Hemsley, Brighton, UK.

On Fri, 10 Oct 2003 18:31:51 +0000 (UTC),
(Gregory L. Hansen) wrote:

The fact that the top speed for this board is 600MHz leads me to think
that it will only work with the "Katmai" flavour of P-III not with its
successor the "coppermine". The Coppermine was the one where they
halved the amount of L2 cache on the basis that they made it full
speed at the same time. These chips require a lower core voltage than
the Katmai ones and some motherboards don't have voltage regulators
that are capable of supplying the correct one. So, if it says top
speed is 600MHz they probably mean that you're limited to the older,
512KB cache, P-III's.

I didn't realize there was such a difference between a PIII 600MHz 512K
cache and a PIII 600MHz 256K cache. Are all PIIIs with 512K Katmais, and
all PIIIs with 256K coppermines?

Regarding the previous paragraph this is in reply to, you could check
the motherboard manual or spec sheet if available, or take the numbers
off the voltage regulator controller chip, head to the respective
manufacturer's website, check the datasheet for the voltage levels it
supports. For an extra level of certainty you could take a continuity
meter and check the corresponding VID pins on that regulator with the
VID pins in the socket (with CPU removed), as per the socket pin
functions seen on Intel's CPU data sheet for the CPU. Hmm, I just
remembered, it's a slot one board... same procedure but checking
continuity at the slot contact instead of a socket pin.

Then there's the BIOS support... see if there's a setting in the BIOS
for "Halt on CPU error" or similar. If so, disable it. You may need
to update the bios, and in rare cases (some Intel boards) you don't ev



When I asked about the VRM, I was told the part number 0950-2837 was for
any PII/PIII up to 600MHz, and they specifically said it's not for
"coppermine". I've asked if the machine would support a faster PIII if a
different VRM were installed, but haven't gotten an answer yet, and I'm
beginning to wonder if I will. I think the motherboard has the 440BX
chipset, if that makes a difference, but I know it also matters which
motherboard the chipset is sitting on. And maybe a BIOS upgrade, which HP
may or may not have, and which I've never done.

The more I learn about this, the more it all gets complicated by little
bits of information like what you've just said above.