First Impressions and overclocking

It's tiny.

The Pentium III 600EB FCPGA

From the back

P3-600 OLGA

Yes, we finally get to see the flip chip on a socket processor! We've already seen the flip chip, OLGA (Organic Land Grid Array) package on the latest P3 processors, and now they've migrated over to the Socket370 on the Coppermine. According to Intel CEO Craig Barrett, "When you get up into the 450-MHz range, you need flip chip forward bonding technology where the active face goes down on the substrate and it gives you lower inductance, better signals, better heat removal characteristics." The 600MHz (4.5 x 133MHz) FCPGA Coppermine chip operates on a scant 1.6V, far less than the 2.00V and 2.05V of current Pentium III processors.

The Coppermine limits users to the upcoming Intel 810e and 820 chipsets. Our Coppermine test motherboard is based on the Intel 810e. The 810e is Intel's "value" chipset. Based on the original 810 (which was based on the BX), the 810e features integrated 2D/3D video (i740), support for the 133MHz FSB, and SDRAM, but lacks ATA66 and AGP 4X. Intel is using the 810e to bridge the memory transition from SDRAM to Rambus. While the processor functions on the 133MHz bus, the memory still runs at 100MHz.

Overclocking? Not this time.

After reading about all the planned speeds Intel had for the 0.18 Coppermine, we were anxious to see how far the chip would overclock. Unfortunately, despite our all efforts, we weren't able to overclock the sample. Either the test motherboard was still very beta, or the Coppermine sample was from an older batch.