old skool O/C: PIII question

[lodog00]

I'm feeling rather nostalgaic, and have a few extra "older" drives, GPUs and such, and was thinking about building an "old school" system to overclock and have some fun with.

I was thinking of buying a tualatin P3. Now, back in the day, I wasn't into O/C and such so I never did read up on the overclocking aspects of these chips. How do they overclock using standard air cooling? I'm not expecting a big leap, but I wonder how far I could push something like a tualatin 1.0 - 1.4 Ghz? I was thinking of just getting a 1.4 P3-S and be done with it, no O/C, but if it can go further, why not?

How's this for an old school system:

All I would need is a mobo, chip, and sam RAM. The mobo and ram are easy. I figure 512MB of cas SDRAM and probably an ASUS CUSL2 (black pearl....hmmmm) would set me back $100-$120. I just need a chip.... I've got everything else. I was thinking getting maybe a 1.26 Ghz tualatin? I can probably get one for under $70.

I blame ebay for this sudden turn of madness....

note: yes, I realize I can probably build a very capable nforce2 based system for the price I would spend for this project.......but humor me!

 

[RalfHutter]

1) You said "the mobo and RAM are easy" Actually that's wrong, they're not easy any more as this S370 stuff is long-gone. There's no new, decent S370 MoBos available any more and only one source of PC150 RAM (Kingmax) and that's fairly suspect. Mushkin has stopped production of their PC150 "Rev3+" RAM. A lot of Crucial PC133 RAM can do PC150 but it won't go to PC160+ speeds. Also, the Cusl2 does not support Tualatin CPUs. You'd need to get one of those Powerleap adapters to use that board with a PIII-S. Or get a board that supports it like a Tusl2 or an Abit ST6.

2) You should be able to get to 150FSB pretty easy with the PIII-S 1.4 but not too much further than that, maybe 160FSB if you really push things. You'd need good RAM that's capable of PC150++ speeds too. Plus there's only one Socket 370 board (Gigabyte GA60-XET) that has 1:5 or 1:6 dividers so you can run your PCI/AGP buses at somewhere near default speeds. On the typical S370 board (like the Tusl2 and ST6) with a 1:4 divider you'll be running your PCI/AGP at 40/80MHz if your FSB is 160MHz.. That's about as far as I'd want to go, if not further.

3) I've had about 4 or 5 of these PIII-S 1.4's and I think they're great CPUs, possibly the best that Intel ever made. All of them will go to 150FSB very easy, most on default Vcore. They also run very cool which makes it easy to run them with a quiet HSF.

4) You could save a lot of $$ on the CPU by playing with the Tualatin Celerons insted of the PIII-S Tualatins. The 1.1A Tualatins run at 100MHz and it's almost guaranteed that they'll OC to 133MHz, most on default Vcore. Their performance is real close to the PIII-S CPUs, especially when they're OCed to 133FSB. You can get a new 1.1A Tualeron for $40, a new PIII-S 1.4 will run you $210.

A lot of stuff to think about but I'd go for it. I really like the Tualatin Celerons and PIII's especially the PIII-S versions. They're fast and run cool and the Tualerons are super-cheap. The biggest stumbling block will be finding a decent MoBo. Unless you get super lucky you'll have to get it off of ebay and who knows what you'll be getting.. Search here or at Asusboards or OCforums for used Tusl2's or ST6's, at least you'd be buying one a little less blindly than via ebay.

 

[Hankysmoo]

Ahhh plz don't spend good money on old hardware =P

 

[techwanabe]

I liked the Tualy solutions myself. At my office last year I built all our new computers on Tualy platforms. They were cheap and fast enough for our needs. (Banks don't need Doom III computers ). Even Dell sold us several Tualy based worstations with imaging system we added. I think it was the hardware makers who precipitated the dirth of Tualy based motherboards because they wanted to push the P4 solutions, even tho many were happy to go with the cheaper Celeron-T's.

 

[lodog00]

The tualy celeron sounds like a great idea! I had forgotten about them!

as for mobo and ram, I still don't think it would be super-difficult to find the parts I need. I've found some Corsair PC150 online for reasonable rates, and I think 256 Mb for this project would be enough.

the mobo IS a little more difficult, but I'll see if I can find that gigabyte. What's funny is I had that board years ago (you did say 60EXT?), but when it came to me, it was DOA, and I never did get to play with it. At that point, P4 Northwoods were coming out and I was getting tired of my Dell P3 933 and the fact that I had to buy so many new parts to o/c. I figure going for P4 was more cost effective.

I'll see what I can turn up....ha.

 

[RalfHutter]

Lodge00 - Turn on your PMs, I've got an ST6R if you're interested .