Written
: 2/23/2000
Written by:
MotoŽ
Sponsored by:
AMK Services
While my original
Project 850 is a very cool system, it's not that practical to haul around
from one LAN party to another. You can imagine the trouble getting a 24" case
with a 7 piece AC-3 sound system and a 21" monitor in a car. I needed a system
that was easy to carry around but fast enough to handle any Quake 3 or UT
situation.
Building a new system is always a lot of fun. For LAN 825,
I decided it was time to return to the Intel side (Project 850 was based on an
AMD Athlon) and based the new LAN box on a Slot 1 PIII-550E. Why did I use a
Slot 1 550E and not a FC-PGA 550E? There are two reasons. The first is I wanted
to use a really big cooler on the CPU. While there are some really nice FC-PGA
coolers around, none can really match the performance of a huge PIII cooler like
the
Alpha P3125 or
Global Win VOS32. The 2nd reason is my supplier didn't have any flip chips
available. :)
The PIII-550E is made on the new .18u manufacturing process.
With 256K of on die L2 cache it can be considered a super Celeron. The only
thing I did to prepare the CPU is taping a temp probe near the core. Since the
L2 cache is on die, you won't have to worry about cooling them with cache spacer
like you would with older Pentium IIIs.
The 550E is multiplier locked like every Intel CPU. That means
the only way to get it running at 825Mhz is by increasing the bus speed of the
motherboard. Increasing bus speed overclocks more than just the CPU. Every other
component is overclocked as well if you don't get the right kind of motherboard.
Next page: Life at 150Mhz FSB
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