Slot 1 P3-700 @ 1.12GHz

Company: PCNut
Product: Slot 1 P3-700 pretested  @ 933+
PCNut Price: $215.00
Date Reviewed: January 26, 2001
Reviewed By: Jason

What's The Big Deal?:

In the quest for overclocking, some people like to take chances and they buy the cheapest CPU they can find, and hope for the best when it comes to seeing how much speed they can squeeze out of it. Other people like to buy a pretested CPU because they want a guaranteed speed, at a fraction of the cost of a real CPU at the same speed. To be honest, I'm both those people, sometimes I buy the cheapest CPU just to be daring, other times I buy a pre-tested CPU when I hear of a good deal.

Well, Humphrey over at PCNut let me know that they got in a very sweet batch of Slot 1 cC0 P3-700s. All the CPUs he has tested so far will run 933MHz at stock voltage, and most would go 1GHz+ with a slight voltage increase! Ever since I bought my BE6-II v2.0, I've been in search of a CPU that would run over 1GHz, and this seemed like the perfect match. I immediately ordered a CPU, and it promptly arrived several days later via FedEx.

PCNut has these CPUs for sale pretested at 933Mhz+, and they come bundled with a Vantec dual fan heatsink and preapplied arctic silver compound. However, a long time ago I bought an Alpha P3125, but never got a chance to use it (except for a short time on a Slot 1 Celeron), so I opted to use my Alpha instead of the Vantec. More on that later, first let me show you a picture of this beautiful CPU:

You really can't tell from the picture, but this new cC0 stepping core is noticeably smaller than my other P3's which are the CA2 stepping. Also, if you look at the picture below, you can decode the information quite easily. It basically says it's a 700MHz, 256k cache, 100MHz FSB, 1.7v. The SL4C3 stepping info identifies it as a cC0, which you can check the page on Intel's web site if you don't believe me.

Another great thing about PCNut is that they include a sheet specifying what hardware the CPU was pretested with, along with the guaranteed speed that it should run and the voltage that should be used. As you can see from the picture below (you can click on it to make it larger), my CPU was pretest to run at 1,050MHz (150FSB) at 1.83 volts. 1.83v is kind of odd because Soyo uses percentages to increase from the stock voltage, and not just actual numbers like other manufacturers.

Well, after mounting the Alpha heatsink (with dual YSTech fans) on the CPU, I plugged it into my BE6-II, fired it up and went straight into the BIOS. I set it for 150FSB and 1.8v, and reboot the system. It loaded up windows just fine and I ran through some benchmarks and stress tests, no errors at all, so I decided to see how much more I could squeeze out of it.

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